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Ask HN: How do you gain more Facebook & Twitter followers?

2 points by shloime ↗ HN
I've been using paid ads to try and gain more Facebook followers, but I haven't had much success. I've also tried using fan-gated giveaways with Rafflecopter but again not much luck. Any tips or advice?

EDIT* I guess what I'm really asking is for advice on how to setup an effective Facebook ad campaign.

7 comments

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sefu_fuller
content is capital.
orangethirty
To further explain:

Know that people follow you because they find value in what you publish. Start producing valuable content and promote it through various forums. Note that a good followers list is created over time. It does not merely happen over night.

shloime
Thus far, I have over 2,500 organic Facebook "Likes". I'm trying to push it to 25,000. Content doesn't seem to accelerate things quickly enough. Any advice on how to run effective Facebook ad campaigns?
orangethirty
Well, if you want to hack your growth, then there definitely ways to do so. Problem is they require capital.
trienthusiast
I tried everything from contests to better sharing positions on my website. what worked best is actually buying Facebook ads. with some optimization you. can get fans for around 0.25$ each. 250$\month will give you thousand fans. I found that at around 10,000 real, targeted fans you can give a strong kick start to your articles. but you need to treat your fan page as a different entity to your website. if you use it just as a RSS feed people will unsubscribe.
ismaelc
This may sound short-sighted, but I used to run campaigns which involved liking pictures shot in a booth of you with a pretty "booth" lady in Facebook, and it seems to do the trick. (Note: FB has TOS regarding running campaigns with images and you might want to check that first).

Do note that my target demographic are male developers in general. And it occurred to me that such campaigns give people the "social right" to like a picture of a hot chic (because it is part of a contest after all). Meaning, you won't get flakked for randomly liking a picture of a hot chic because you're doing it to win something.

Anyway it was successful only to some extent, because as some folks mentioned here, Content will always be king. The campaign I mentioned needs to be followed up with consistent and "real" engagement.

psadri
In addition to good content, you have to be controversial.