How To Convert Facebook Visitors to Likes the Easy Way

A lot of businesses and organizations have taken the first step and created a Facebook Page. The next step is usually to invite all of your friends to “Like” the page. This usually results in all of 15 “Likes” total. Next you implement a plan to drive a ton of traffic to your Page and it seems to be working, but only a tiny percentage care enough to click that little “Like” button.

If you could ever reach 200 or 1,000 or 10,000 “Likes” then the users themselves would help keep the content and activity fresh with only some regular prompting. But how do you get a higher conversion rate of visitors to “likes”?

Reveal Tabs

One technique that works well for many businesses is called a Reveal Tab. You may have seen them before. The AllFacebook.com Facebook page uses a reveal tab. It works like this:

1. The visitor comes to your Facebook page and sees a message that says “Click Like to see our special report on the migratory patterns of eastern bluebirds” (insert your own offer)
2. Once the visitor clicks “like” the page refreshes and shows the promised content.

Ta da! Instant “Like” conversion.

Reveal Tab Strategy

The strategy for your reveal tab is critically important. The offer you are making to the visitor must be:

• consistent with the message that you used to drive traffic;
• be something the visitor will want; and
• deliver valuable content. If the content isn’t as good as the build up to it, then you will be “Unliked” as quickly as you were “Liked.”

You should also use this as an opportunity to show the visitor what you can do for them. There are rare opportunities on Facebook to make blatant marketing appeals without losing some goodwill, but this is one of them. You have just provided valuable content that they wanted, so offer some related paid services or products.

Reveal Tab Implementation  

There are a number of ways to implement these reveal tabs, but the easiest way is by using a Facebook App called “Static HTML: iframe tabs”.

1. Just type that name into the search field on Facebook. You will end up on a page that looks like this:
2. Click on “Add to My Page” (left column, highlighted in above image)
3. Select the Page where you want to add it.
4. Navigate to your Facebook Page.
5. Navigate to the newly created tab. It's called “Welcome” by default.
6. Check the box next to “No scrollbars” and leave “Enable FBML” unchecked.
7. There are two fields where you can paste HTML code for the default content (for non-fans) and for the Fans-only content. You will have to get the HTML code from your website designer or developer unless you’ve built the pages elsewhere and can copy and paste the code.
8. Click “Save and view tab..”
9. You can choose to see the tab as a fan or non-fan for testing. Just refresh the page to return to the configuration.

Important Last Step: You will likely want this tab to be the default tab for anyone visiting your Facebook page so be sure to “Edit Page” and change the “Default Landing Tab” to this new tab you’ve created.

Using a reveal tab like this can be extremely effective in converting visitors to “Likes.” Some implementations of this technique have seen conversion rates as high as 70% and have accumulated 10,000 likes in as little as 8-10 weeks. So get cracking and let us know about your results in the comments below.

[Image: Sean MacEntee]