For those who are serious about their social media profiles, it wouldn’t be surprising if you wondered more than once about how to increase your followers on Facebook. After all, more Facebook followers means that you have a better chance to promote your products or services if you are a business or to demand a higher rate if you are an influencer. But how can you get more Facebook followers in a sustainable way? 

In this article, we will go through the different ways to increase the number of your Facebook followers. At the end of the day, there is no special formula to increase Facebook followers and likes that replaces a well-thought-out strategy where you put real time and effort into follower acquisition. Luckily, we are going to explain 12 best practices that will help you to increase Facebook followers whether you are a business, influencer, or simply a Facebook fan.

12 Best Practices to Increase Facebook Followers

Almost anyone who wants their content to be seen by more people asks themselves how to increase Facebook followers. After all, your followers are generally more likely to be interested in your content and, therefore, to interact with it. Moreover, having a large number of followers can show those who are not currently following your page that they might consider doing so. Many may think that, if you have many followers, there must be for a reason for that. Lastly, Facebook also provides helpful analytical insights about those following your account, which can help you further refine your content approach. 

However, is there some hack to increase Facebook followers? Unfortunately, there is no universal trick that helps you double, triple, or quadruple your Facebook follower count overnight (outside of buying followers, which is not the best idea). 

The good news is that our best practices to increase followers on Facebook can help you sustainably build your following. Below, we will highlight how to increase Facebook followers with 12 best practices:

1. Create Engaging and Shareable Content 
2. Know what Content Formats your Audience Prefers
3. Benchmark Yourself against Competitors
4. Post Often, Consistently, and at the Right Times
5. Encourage People to Follow your Page!
6. Be Active and Engage with your Audience
7. Find the Right Hashtags to Use
8. Use Contests and Giveaways to your Advantage
9. Build Relationships and Partner with Other Pages
10. Link to your Facebook Page
11. Become a Member of Relevant Facebook Groups
12. Consider Working with Influencers

1. Create Engaging and Shareable Content

When trying to gain more followers on Facebook, you should never ignore the importance of continually crafting engaging content that people want to consume. For this reason, when asking yourself how to increase followers on your Facebook page, you need to be aware of what topics or themes will pique your audience’s interest. Is your audience interested in humor, sports analysis, or thought-provoking content in a specific field? What interesting take do you have in your focus area?  

You may be wondering if your content is already resonating with your audience or if you need to take it up a notch. A good way to get an idea if you are producing engaging content is to look at the post-interaction rates of other similar profiles in your niche and compare it to your own. With the right social media tool that allows you to track many competitor profiles, you can quickly analyze how your profile stacks up against others. If similar profiles have a higher post-interaction rate, then it may make sense to see what type of content they are producing and how they are presenting it. In this way, you can better understand how your posts are performing compared to other posts from similar profiles.

2. Know what Content Formats your Audience Prefers

You should always know who your target audience is and what content they prefer. Obvious, right? However, do you know what content format typically generates the most reactions in your niche? You might not. Along these lines, one important element in understanding how to increase your Facebook page followers is related to what content formats are preferred by your audience. In other words, you need to research trends to see what content format is performing the best in your niche or industry.  

For instance, with the right social media tool, you can analyze different content formats on Facebook, whether it is Stores, Pictures, Reels, etc., and see which format is correlated with better metrics, for example, post-interaction rates. If you see that Reels are getting much more traction than posts with pictures, then it makes sense that more of your posts should be in a Reels format.

3. Benchmark Yourself against Competitors

In keeping with the theme of social media research, it can also pay off to benchmark yourself against your competitors to see where your profile currently sits in relation to others in your industry or niche. This is important for goal setting and understanding what is realistically achievable for your Facebook page. It can also be a great way to learn from others.

Remember, comparing only the number of followers you have with other profiles is helpful for goal setting, but not much else. However, benchmarking and studying other profiles can help you understand WHY they may have more followers on Facebook. For instance, looking at overall engagement rates for profiles and other metrics such as post per day can help you see the type of metrics that are associated with high follower counts. In analyzing other profiles, you should also look at the various metrics associated with individual posts to see what content is performing best. Using a social media tool for benchmarking and content analysis can help you understand what is performing at a high level, as well as things to improve upon.

4. Post Often, Consistently, and at the Right Times

Posting as often as possible and at a consistent pace is important to maintaining and growing your following. First, you always want to stay on your followers’ minds while having them look forward to your next posts. Second, the more you post, the more content of yours is out there to attract new followers.

However, one often overlooked aspect that is important for learning how to gain more followers on Facebook is by researching the best items to post on Facebook. That’s right, posting at the right time matters since it can help your posts with the Facebook algorithm while also showing you when your followers may be most likely to interact with your posts. 

Finding the right times to post is not as difficult as you may think. We covered this topic in another article, so don’t miss it.

5. Encourage People to Follow your Page!

It may seem fairly obvious, but one of the keys relating to how to increase followers on your Facebook page is to actively encourage people to do just that! When you are curating your content, also be sure to ask them to follow your page. Similar to encouraging people to share your content, you should use CTAs to tell people that they should follow your page. It can also be helpful to give people a reason for following, such as the benefit of easily keeping up on all the new content on your page. 

While this doesn’t replace the need for engaging content, reminding people that they should follow you can be useful.

6. Be Active and Engage with your Audience

If you want to understand how to have more followers on Facebook, don’t forget that keeping them is almost as important as gaining them. Continuing to create engaging posts is important, but it is also crucial that you engage with your community. When you engage with your audience, it shows that you truly are interested in what they have to say and demonstrates that you care. This makes people want to stick around.

7. Find the Right Hashtags to Use

Using the right hashtags can get your posts noticed by people not already following your page, which can help you gain new followers. Hashtags are one of the primary ways that you can highlight to others that your posts relate to a specific topic or trend. This is because when you use a hashtag, you can more easily reach those who are following that hashtag. In this way, others can more easily discover your posts, enjoy the content, and follow you as a result. However, how can you actually find what Facebook hashtags you should be using and are relevant to you?

Luckily, we have covered this topic in another article. For our purposes here, it is simply helpful to emphasize that if you are serious about gaining new followers on Facebook, then hashtag research is undeniably important.

8. Use Contests and Giveaways to your Advantage

Contests and giveaways can also be a great way for people to get excited about your product or simply be interested in following your profile. While winning a prize or content may be what originally brings them in contact with your page, this also gives you an opportunity to show off your content and/or offers. This may be what ultimately convert these contest participants into followers. Alternatively, they may want to follow your page so they don’t miss out on the next contest or giveaway as well. In both cases, they would then be following your page!

There are, of course, many different contests you can run or simple giveaways to set up. Be sure that you tie a contest or giveaway to people following your page or some other type of action such as commenting on a post or liking your page. It is also important to clearly define the rules of the contest or giveaway and follow through on running it correctly. 

Keep in mind that there are free tools available that can help you generate winners for contests run on your Facebook page, so don’t miss taking advantage of those.

9. Build Relationships and Partner with Other Pages

Building relationships with other Facebook pages is a great way to help increase your Facebook followers. There are many different individuals or businesses that want to gain new Facebook followers and, if the situation calls for it, why not cooperate and help each other out?

Cross-posting and content sharing is a great way for two or more Facebook profiles, whether it is business or individuals, to introduce themselves to the followers of the other profile. In this way, two or more profiles can leverage the reach of other pages. While this may not make as much sense for competitors, there are definitely win-win opportunities for those who see it as mutually beneficial.

10. Link to your Facebook Page

One of the simplest ways related to how to increase Facebook followers for businesses is to simply link to your Facebook page wherever you can. The vast majority of businesses have a website as well as a host of other social media profiles on other networks. Always remember to link to the pages you want people to know about!

11. Become a Member of Relevant Facebook Groups

12. Consider Working with Influencers

One way concerning how to increase your Facebook business page followers is to partner with influencers that work within your industry or have significant reach with your target audience. To be clear, working with influencers is not for everyone, and it can have its drawbacks, especially relating to how much you may have to pay to work with them. However, working with influencers can be a great way to use well-known profiles to reach potential new followers in a particular niche. While anyone can apply this strategy, this may be especially relevant for businesses that want to better build their brand but haven’t quite had the traction with their target audience that they initially hoped for.

An influencer can simply promote your page or there can be a more elaborate cooperation such as running a contest with that influencer. It is important to always define the cooperation carefully and make sure that it will deliver the results that you want, in this case generating new followers for your profile. Lastly, it is essential that you find the right influencer for your purposes. The good news is that there are some easy step-by-step processes to follow and tools you can use to find the right influencer.

Conclusion: How to Increase Facebook Followers

As you have seen in our 12 best practices for how to get more Facebook followers, there is no special trick that helps you do this. Rather, it is about putting in the work and making sure you have a well-thought-out strategy which incorporates as many of the best practices listed above as possible. 

Social media tools can be helpful in getting more followers on Facebook. This is because social media tools can provide you with various insights about what content format and types are driving interactions, while also helping you manage your growing community.

Fanpage Karma is an “all-in-one” social media tool that provides a free 14-day trial. Importantly, Fanpage Karma allows you to track an unlimited number of profiles, which helps you to more effectively analyze and benchmark yourself against as many Facebook pages as you want. There is also a free weekly webinar that discusses how to use the social media tool to get powerful insights, manage your social media community, research various trends, and publish your posts.