The Best Strategy When Using ‘Invite Friends’ to Gain Facebook Fans

If you haven’t noticed yet, Facebook has added the ‘Invite Friends’ feature to their Fan Pages, which sends out notifications to everyone that is invited suggesting they Like the Page. This means that all administrators of your Fan Page call now invite all their friends, to help kick-start your fan page or further expand your reach on Facebook.

To grow your page, you need dedicated fans.  These fans are very important, as they are the people that will be talking about your brand, commenting on photos, writing reviews and recommending you to their friends.

The ‘Invite Friends’ link can be found on the right-hand side of your page, under the admins.  This is the most direct and visible way Facebook has ever allowed Page invite to be sent, so make the most of it while you can! Facebook may remove this feature or begin delivering invites through a less visible channel.

Timing

For maximum effect send out invites when the majority of your friends will be using a web version of Facebook.  This is because users are more accustomed to browsing Pages from a full sized browser, and some native mobile apps do not support Page browsing or Liking.

Make sure invites are sent out to your friends when they are more likely to be at home, usually on a weekday evening or weekend.  Your notification will have greatest effect when it first appears.  The recipient needs to have enough time to react and be on a web version of Facebook to achieve the best conversion rate.

When gaining several ‘Likes’ from a users friends in a short period of time, they may see a the following notification, “[friend name] and [x] other friends Like [your Page] story in the news feed.

For example if this was to happen to our Initi8 Marketing Page, you would see the notification, ‘Thomas Crawshaw and 3 other friends Like Initi8 Marketing,’ with a link through to our page.

These stories can expose a link to your Page to people you aren’t friends with via compelling social proof, helping you earn additional Likes from your invites.

Hope this helps in improving your reach when sending out invites, please leave a comment below and let me in on your results!