01-28-2020
Ok as most of you know, I have been describing the steps I have taken in my journey to try and create an online business. I have reached the point that I need to increase exposure to the items I am designing. As I have mentioned before I have very little experience with Facebook, while I am computer Savvy I had always spent my online time playing video games etc.
I decided that using Facebook to advertise my items would be my starting place. Given that I had a private profile and very few friends, I decided that I would need to start expanding my friends list. Thinking back on it I am not sure the method I am about to describe was the best but it’s the one that I took.
I created a Page for Unusual Choices and began trying to get people to like it as I noticed that once it had at least ten likes Facebook would share it to small amounts of people. Therefore, I tried the few friends I had but only got two likes. So then, I decided to join groups related to entrepreneur, yard sale, Craig’s list ETC. and post my site there as well as some of the items that I had designed. This resulted in 2 or 3 more likes but nothing beyond that. Not wanting to spend ages on trying to get just ten likes I found a group that promised to like your pages if you liked theirs. So I joined the group and made a few posts, liked a few peoples items. The promise of a like for a like obviously was not returned, but I was able to get the last few likes to get to 10. I did not see a huge difference after that but I did get one or two useful comments from the entrepreneur groups, though most of it was people spamming their businesses or scams.
Considering how long it was taking to get exposure this way I decided that I did not really use my Facebook for anything anyway so having an insane friends list did not matter. I began adding every single person that showed up in the you may know this person and in a matter of about 2 days, I had over 1k “friends”. To keep from seeming spammy I did not immediately invite them to like my page I just waited until I hit that 1k mark. I then sent out the like/follow requests. Almost immediately, I got another 50 likes and quite a few followers.
The downside to this though is obviously many of the “friends” I had were spam bots or scammers and constantly messaged me. So for the next 48 hours I kept putting them on ignore or just removing them until I had it narrowed down to 800 or so that seemed normalish.
Now that things have leveled out a bit I had time to think about my actions. I don’t necessarily think the “like for a like” groups were a good idea and would not suggest that. The other options may not have been the worst though I could have sacrificed time for better quality “friends” by checking their profiles etc first. That being said I have continued to post designs at a rate of about 1 per day or 1 every two days. (Nothing elaborate up to this point but their slowly improving I feel.) I have noticed that without spamming my link in various groups etc I am starting to see 4 or 5 visitors a day from Facebook showing up on my stores. However, I have still yet to sell any items.
Many of the videos I have watched suggested an Instagram account due to the fact that you can use hashtag keywords to help drive traffic that way. I think I will look into that next.
If you have had a similar experience or a suggestion on how I would have had better results feel free to post below. Remember the route I took was an attempt at quickly getting my numbers up and I was able to reach about 75 followers to my Page in 4 or 5 days using this method.