How to Invite Your Facebook Friends to 'Like' Your Business Page

Some of my advisor clients are incredibly successful on Facebook and for some it’s a waste of time. What’s the difference? Demographics. Marketing with Facebook business pages is not for everyone. In fact, my own Facebook business page is not a core focus of my marketing efforts because most of my target prospects are more active on LinkedIn.

But for advisors with retired, predominantly female, or younger target audiences, Facebook can be the most cost-effective way to get in front of new prospects (often less than $1 per click). If your clients are under 50 or are mostly women, you should get serious about your Facebook strategy and focus on getting more likes for your business page. One first step is to invite relevant personal friends to like your page.

Should You Invite Personal Friends to Like Your Page?

There are a few key benefits of inviting personal Facebook friends to like your business page. First and foremost, people who like your page will see your updates and the content you share, so they’ll be more aware of what you do and how you can help. This could spell more referrals from them in the future.

Secondly, once someone has liked your page, Facebook will automatically recommend your page to their friends. This means that if a client likes your page, their friends will see that they have liked your page and be able to like it themselves.

Facebook also shows your posts to people who are demographically similar to those who have liked your page. This means that if 50 of your clients have liked your page, Facebook will use its magic to clone those clients and show your posts to people just like them, presumably your ideal future clients.

Finally, Facebook automatically creates an advertising audience for you comprised of “people who like your page and their friends.” You can use this audience to grow your network with paid ads in the future.

For these reasons, you’ll want to invite some of your personal Facebook friends to like your page. Which ones? Only people who represent your target demographic or who can refer you business.

Why You Shouldn’t Invite Everyone to Like Your Page

Don’t invite everyone you know to like your page. Why not? It will confuse the algorithm and dilute your demographic data.

Here’s what I mean. Say you live in Chicago but you went to school in Florida and have a lot of friends from college that live down south. Should you invite them? Not if they don’t represent your ideal client and they’re unlikely to refer you business.

This is because the Facebook algorithm heavily depends on showing your page to people similar to those who have liked it, so we don’t want to dilute your audience with people who don’t fit your target demographic.

Additionally, your content is likely to get low engagement from that audience, which can hurt your content in the long run. The more relevant your page audience is, the more valuable your content will be to your audience and the more engagement it will get.

How to Invite Your Facebook Friends to Like Your Business Page

Now that you understand why you should invite people to like your page and exactly who you should invite, here are the steps to invite your friends to like your business page.

First, you must be a page administrator to invite people to like the page, so make sure you’re logged in with appropriate permissions. Next, go to your business Facebook page by searching the business name in the Facebook Search bar (or go to your custom page URL if you know it).

Next, click “Invite your friends to like this Page” in the right column.

Then, in the pop-up window, customize the invitation message you would like your friends to receive. I recommend something like this:

“Hi, I’m inviting you to like my business page so you can see the photos and helpful content we share. Thank you for supporting our firm!”

Finally, select which friends you’d like to invite, then click “Send Invites”!

Your friends will receive a notification that they’ve been invited to like your page. Typically we see from 30% to 50% of recipients accept. If a person’s image has been grayed out, that means you’ve already invited them to like the page and they haven’t responded yet.

How to Get More Likes

Once you’ve invited appropriate personal friends to like your business page, you’ll want to work to get more relevant likes so that your content gets greater exposure. What can you do to get more likes?

Send an Email Asking Clients to Like Your Page

This step is obvious, but most advisors haven’t done it. I recommend sending an email to let your clients know that your business is live on Facebook and asking them to like the page. Share a few recent photos or interesting posts from your page to let them know what they’re missing.

Post Engaging Content and Boost to Your Target Audience

The best way to get people to like your page is to boost content that is interesting or valuable to them. My favorite way to do this on Facebook is with engaging infographics, like this post that got over 1,000 clicks from Facebook the day it was posted.

Share Photos and Tag People

Truly successful Facebook business pages use photos from events and advisors’ personal lives to engage their audience. Facebook is all about photos and videos, so if you’re serious about Facebook, you’ll want to post real photos of you and your team on a regular basis. Tagging your clients and friends will show the posts to their friends.

Promote Your Page with Paid Ads

As mentioned above, you can boost your content to have it appear in the newsfeed of people you target, but to take it a step further, you can promote your page to get more likes. Make sure you are ruthless with the audience parameters to make sure you’re only paying for likes from potential clients. Too many irrelevant page likes will throw off the Facebook algorithm and hurt you in the long run.

Want more helpful Facebook tips for financial advisors? Like my business page on Facebook here! If you have specific marketing questions, please email them to me at [email protected]and I’ll do my best to answer them! In the meantime, be sure you’re subscribed to my newsletter so you get all the latest tips to your inbox!

About Claire

Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency a marketing firm serving top independent financial advisors. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis. It’s her goal to help specialist advisors target their ideal prospects with content marketing.