Social networks are in no way exhausted only with Facebook and Twitter but they are the major source of traffic, and playing with tens of other such networks will be just a waste of resource in an activity with an unclear purpose.

Facebook has already proven itself as a good source of high-quality traffic. According to data from Socialbakers.com, Mark Zuckerberg’s social network already has 2 billion monthly users (by mid-2017). The question you need to ask yourself is how to use these one and a half billion internet consumers to develop your online business?

Relatives, friends, and acquaintances (again)

The best way to start a business, be it an online business or another one, is to mobilize your relatives, friends, and acquaintances. There is always a group of people around you, who will be happy to help you and invest a few minutes of their free time for you. For instance, you sure have received a message from a friend or acquaintance that their daughter is competing in a photo contest on Facebook and that a “like” from you will push her further in the chart. Now, do you see how the transfer of traffic is realized?

You publish something on your profile and ask your friends and acquaintances to share it, they share it with their friends, while sometimes even their friends share it with their own friends. If you share a link to your 500 friends and only 100 of them share it to their friends (let’s assume that they each of them has 500 friends, too), then you have reached a huge number of possible consumers. If what is being shared is really interesting, you can be sure that the number of shares will be much higher and you may reach hundreds of thousands of people.

However, the number of your friends is limited and they can easily get tired to sharing something for you, especially if they do it at your request and not because they really like what they “like” on Facebook.

A Facebook page

It is compulsory to create a Facebook fan page for your internet project. Or a useful page if you have to create one for Residence for adults for example or a center of rehabilitation. There you can accumulate a large mass of consumers, who are interested exactly in what you are doing. This way, when you publish a concrete link, you will reach the right consumers for the information you are sharing.

The Facebook pages of the websites and concrete brands, however, are not the best source of traffic. This is because these pages reach an insufficient number of fans because consumers are well aware that they will be flooded with new articles or products through this page. That is why themed pages come to aid to the digital marketing experts. They are numerous, while end-consumers do not realize that they have voluntarily agreed to be flooded with advertising messages.

A good example of this is the Great Day page. This is a page, which at first sight seems to attract consumers with positive emotions. Many people become fans of a Facebook page simply because they like a certain photo, article, or positive status. Usually, such pages publish various things, they make consumers happy, entertain them with jokes, links, photos, and sometimes games. End-consumers do not even realize that they have become fans of a well-planned page, which aims at attracting tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans, who eventually will generate the desired traffic to a concrete website or to several websites.

This happens when the administrator of the page publishes a link to their own website or product. Some consumers see this on their walls and if they are interested, they take concrete actions (they “like”, share, or click on the link). Consumers make no difference between the ordinary activities on a certain page and those having a concrete goal – attracting traffic to a concrete website. An example of this is seen in the pages and groups of the following type: “Healthy – my way of life”, “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus”, “My home is my castle”, “Baby SMILES coo-coo”, “Grandma’s kitchen”, etc. There are countless such pages. Some are created to advertise a concrete website or a group of websites, while others are created with the purpose to sell advertising.

It may sound wrong and incorrect but the truth is that there is nothing wrong in the way they transfer traffic from Facebook to other websites.

Developing such a page is not an easy task, especially in terms of attracting tens to hundreds of thousands of fans. Some companies have entire departments dealing with this activity and their only job is to maintain the Facebook pages. In order to avoid entering into an endless adventure, you can address the administrator of the page that has a topic similar to your project. Pay for several publications or a game and you will get the desired traffic immediately, instead of developing your own page for months.

The Facebook surprise of 2013

Until December 2013 attracting people through Facebook pages following the aforementioned methods was a common practice. The business with such pages even went beyond all reasonable levels, as between $10,000 and $50,000 was paid for some Facebook pages with hundreds of thousands of fans. To some people, the creation, development, and sale of such pages had turned into a profitable business, while to the media groups they were a major source of traffic. Until the aforementioned date, a publication in the fan page used to reach a large part of the consumers. This way, if you publish a link on a page with 300,000 fans, you can expect about 10,000-20,000 clicks on the link in question.

One fine day, in December 2013, however, things changed drastically. Facebook changed its rules and everyone was seized by panic. The reason was that the “free lunch” was over and the biggest social network decided that it should profit from this traffic that everyone was realizing through them without paying for it. After the changes, it was no longer sure how many of all fans of a page will see a certain status, picture, or link. If you are very active and often publish links, it may turn out that the bigger part of them does not reach even 1% of your consumers. This way, many websites realizing more than 200,000 visits a day thanks to such Facebook groups returned to their starting point and their traffic collapsed to 20,000, while some were even faced with levels of 3,000 visits a day. A drastic drop that killed the business of many projects, believed to be immortal because they found the successful scheme of free advertising on Facebook.

Many companies offering Facebook advertising went bankrupt or simply hastily reoriented to other types of activities. Many entrepreneurs sacked their teams, thinking that they were the reason for the drastic decrease in traffic. It is a fact that the change was felt everywhere but for a long time no one had an explanation about what was happening.

A year and a half later things were back to normal and people were already aware and observing the new rules of the world’s biggest social network. The only difference is that more and more often Facebook advertising is used as a means for a publication/link/picture/video to reach a wider audience.