How to Generate Revenue From Your Facebook Fan Page
Published by James Parsons
Most people these days simply refer to Facebook Fan Pages as simply Pages, and for a good reason; the era of their use primarily as pages for fan worship is long past. Today, Pages are used as marketing hubs and tools to build communities around certain brands, entities, events and media.
It’s entirely possible to make money from Facebook, though there are two different, non-exclusive ways to go about it. Which you choose depends on your goals, your resources and the nature of your business. You can even use them both, if you have several paths to monetization.
Step 1: Create a Page
Both the easiest and the hardest part of the whole process is properly creating your Page. Make sure you choose the proper classification; some types of pages are limited in what they can do and what they can display, while others have additional features specifically for that type of entity. Picking the wrong one will hamper you. Likewise, be careful in selecting the name you use. You can change your name and URL once, but it’s not easy; Facebook doesn’t want you to casually rebrand at the drop of a hat.
Take care when setting up your Page with all of the information you can fit in. This includes, primarily, you About section. The About section requires several sentences as a description of your business, a link to your main business page – essential if you ever hope to be verified, among other things – and your industry.
Your profile picture and cover photo are crucial as well. No one trusts a Page without a cover photo, for example. Your profile picture can be as simple as a recognizable shot of your logo, or you can jazz it up for a special event. It’s a good idea to change up these pictures every few months, as long as they stay recognizably branded.
Step 2: Build an Audience
When you’re first starting out, you can upload a mailing list if you have one, and Facebook will cross-check those emails with valid Facebook accounts. Any user who maintains a Facebook account with that email address will be given the option to like your page. You might want to hold off on doing this until you have some content on your page, though.
For content, you’re going to want to post and schedule several posts for the coming days. Ideally, you’ll post interesting industry content, content from your blog, content from other partner blogs and general interest content your users like. You might not know what works best yet, but time and study will reveal those secrets to you.
Once you have some content, you can upload your mailing list. You can also employ other techniques for growing your page, including running paid ads if you have the budget to do so.
Step 3: Funnel the Audience to a Monetized Page
This is the first of the two options you have to monetize your Facebook Page, and it’s not entirely just monetizing Facebook. See, the primary purpose of this method is to funnel people away from Facebook and on to pages where people can actually earn you money.
See, you can’t just run affiliate ads on Facebook. They don’t even really like affiliate links, though you can get away with those in organic posts. So, instead, you lead people off-site and on to your own website, blog, or storefront.
You can do this through ads and you can do this through posting content on your site and linking to it on Facebook. In fact, you should be doing both. Every person who visits your site from Facebook is a possible conversion.
You can’t really use optimized landing pages in organic posts. Facebook doesn’t like organic posts being dominated by such advertising. They’ll deliver a hit to your organic reach and make it harder for your other messages to make it through. Ads, however, can and should always link to an optimized landing page.
Once the users have left Facebook and landed on your website, you have all the flexibility and power of SEO and conversion rate optimization available to use.
Step 4: Create a Facebook App Store
The second option available is to run a store directly on Facebook. If you do this, you can potentially eliminate off-site marketing entirely. It’s not as effective as having your own store – people prefer to shop off Facebook, and you lose the presence of a good blog – but it’s perfectly acceptable.
There are a number of services you can use to set up a store in a tab app, including Shopify. The idea is that the service will create and host a storefront for you, and Facebook will become the portal to that store.
Note that such a store is in a tab app, which is somewhat limited in use on Facebook. You have one space in the top bar for your store to be labeled, but it’s not a fancy graphical label like tabs used to be. The graphical label is on the left sidebar some ways down the page. It’s not a lot, so you have to put a little extra effort into linking directly to your shop at every opportunity, so people know where to find it.
Step 5: Engage, Maintain, Grow
Once you have the path to monetization set up, everything else is about maintenance and growth. You have to grow your fan base, which you can do by posting compelling content and running advertisements that ask for page likes. You have to engage those users so they keep seeing your posts and thus are continually exposed to the idea of your business, leading them to like you more and potentially convert. And, of course, you have to maintain your store and your sales funnel so that you never miss sales due to a broken line of code or a missing product.
Your bread and butter with this process is going to be Insights. Study your Facebook insights and learn your audience. Cater your messages and your products to their needs and desires. Get them where they want it, and they’ll give you money to do so.
New Methods
As of 2018, there are a few new methods you can use to generate revenue: sponsored posts and shoutouts, selling products, and dropshipping. However, reach is also more delicate these days, so you don’t want to annoy your fanbase. Look into the 80/20 rule, which says 80% of your content should be useful or funny content that isn’t business-related, and 20% should be on any of the above; things that could potentially drive revenue to your page. Users don’t log into Facebook just to be sold things, they want to see what their favorite people and brands are up to. So, don’t sell too hard, and focus on creating great content.
