Increasing Facebook Fans: Where Your Partners Come into Play!

Erica Stenz, Club One Marketing Coordinator

Since the switch to Facebook’s Timeline, most companies are finding it harder to increase their number of Facebook fans without the ability to fan-gate or auto-redirect users to custom-created tabs. Likewise, Club One’s previously steady increase of new monthly Facebook fans has also decreased since the Timeline launch. So rather than generating new fans through our Facebook apps and promotions, we needed to think outside the box. After testing out a number of different methods, Club One found that leveraging our partnerships via Social Media has become the best way to generate new Facebook fans.

As an example, we recently created a Facebook promotion for a sold-out, athletic event, sponsored by Club One in San Francisco. The race coordinators e-mailed their interested participants about Club One’s Facebook promotion as follows: “Post: ‘I want to join Club One at the Race’ on Club One’s Facebook page and you’ll be entered to win a race registration!” Within just ten days of their e-mail blast, Club One gained 100 new Facebook comments and 70 new Facebook fans. Even better, the race coordinators helped us generate these new prospects without us having to push a promotion on our current members.

Following a Facebook campaign, these next three steps produce successful membership results:

Step 1: Send a personal thank you to every Facebook participant.

Step 2: Direct participants to a web form and collect lead information.

Step 3: Follow-up with a special join offer.

In addition to targeting these leads, it’s important to maintain a strong presence on our partner’s Social Media platforms. As part of Club One’s Micro Content Strategy, we post a weekly “partner shout-out”— a post that promotes our partners on Club One’s Facebook page. Using the “tagging” Facebook tool, it is very easy to cross-promote Club One across multiple Social Media channels.

We’ll continue to utilize our partnerships as we grow our Facebook pages to more than 10,000 fans across our 18 club Facebook pages. Without a doubt, this strategy is a very effective and cost-efficient way to market new target audiences and best leverage our partnerships.