Let’s face it—we all want to be liked. Sometimes we want it so much we even think about “buying” Facebook likes.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: don’t do it. Buying Facebook likes is worse than a waste of money. It’s a shortcut to ruining your company’s credibility and reducing the effectiveness of your future ad campaigns.

There are so many other ways to get likes from people who actually like and care about your product. If you’re tempted to buy Facebook likes, please try these five strategies first. Pick one, give it a go, and before long you’ll be getting likes that actually mean something.

1. Find Your Fans’ Friends

If you already have fans on your Facebook page, you’re in a great position to get more. Just like investing where making money is easier when you already have money, getting more Facebook likes is easier when you already have fans.

All you need to do is find more people who are like your current fans. Fortunately, Facebook makes this easy with their powerful custom audiences tool.

You’re probably already familiar with the regular form of targeting on Facebook ads. You can tailor your audience down to an incredibly precise set of characteristics and demographics.

Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences are a little different. In this case, you supply data to Facebook—in the form of a list of email addresses or phone numbers—and Facebook’s algorithm finds similar users for you.

Running an ad campaign to an audience composed of people who are like your current fans is killing two birds with one stone. Not only are the users in your lookalike audience likely to be more qualified leads, but you save a ton of time you would have spent sorting through different demographics and interest groups.

How To Do It

The first step to running a campaign with a Lookalike Audience is heading over to Custom Audiences and creating a new one.

Then, pick fans of your page.

Lastly, pick a country to target and decide if you want to optimize for reach or similarity.

Optimizing for reach will get you more impressions, optimizing for similarity may get you more likes/conversions, and which you decide to choose will depend on past experiments and the overall size of your fan base.

2. Grab Their Attention With Video

Videos are one of the most powerful ways to stand out on social media. Facebook is already such a massive video destination that it rivals YouTube. If you want to be successful, of course, you can’t just put any old videos out there.

You need videos with two things:

• A balance of sales and story: When people don’t know you, they don’t know what to expect. So tell a story that will make them want to get to know you better. Maybe they’ll buy later, but don’t worry about that now.
• A call-to-action: Of course, no matter what you want to have a call-to-action in your video ad. The biggest mistake you can make is leaving this out, because it gives the user nothing to do afterward even if they were in love with the ad!

Don’t forget about A/B testing either. While making a video ad will definitely be a creative leap if you’ve never done it before, it’s made a little more systematic when you can track exactly where users are pausing or stopping your video. That way, you can go into your next project with a better idea of what users actually like.

How To Do It

As Wistia founder and video marketer, Chris Savage writes, the first kind of video your company makes should probably be an explainer video.

An explainer video tells the world about the problem your product solves, how it does it, and the concrete benefit that brings to user’s lives. Later on, you can make more complex videos designed to teach people about new things or even to just plain delight and inspire them.

(Source: Wistia)

Start simple. An explainer video is a great place to begin, and you’ll be able to measure the ROI on it right away. Then you can see if video is something you want to really invest in.

3. Find Your Most Successful Content And Share It

Don’t spend tons of time coming up with amazing content to put in your ads. Since you’ve already invested time in making original content, you can use your best content to make an ad that will blow all your other ones out of the water.

What you want to do first is use an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner. Look at your blog or your company site and check out what domains are getting the most backlinks and referrals. This content is already proven.

Take your top 10 pages and imagine you have to group them by themes. Let’s say it’s “lead generation.” Instead of writing an eBook just about lead generation to drive people to your Facebook page, take your best-performing posts about lead generation and repackage them into content you can use in Facebook ads.

How To Do It

Once you’ve picked out a series of four or five blog posts that you think could make up an eBook or PDF, you need to choose a tool to help you do it. Fortunately, there are a plethora designed to do just that, ranging in both price and simplicity:

• Serif: Serif is a fully-fledged desktop publisher with easy editing and nice-looking standard templates—it does run a bit expensive, however, at about $90 for a license.
• Print Friendly & PDF: This free Chrome extension is surprisingly powerful, and you can make some good-looking eBooks and PDFs with it. It does require a bit of tinkering to get right, so check out our guide before you start.
• Pay someone else to do it: This is the easy option! Services like eBook DesignWorks and crowdSPRING offer varying options for generally low-cost and quick design work.

Creating an eBook from your already-successful content is one of the most powerful ways to drive new people to your Facebook page, and there’s an option for any budget, so get started now!

4. Run A Contest Or Giveaway

One of the best ways to get new people to Like your Facebook page and really mean it is to run a contest. Why does it matter if they mean it? Because Facebook likes from people you bought don’t mean anything when it comes to getting conversions, and that’s the name of the game.

A contest, however, can drum up a ton of organic interest in your company. And what you actually give away doesn’t need to be anything big.

What you’re tapping into is a social psychology phenomenon known as reciprocity. Give people something for free, and they’ll feel like they should give you something back. The easiest thing to give? A Facebook like.

How To Do It

First off, pick your prize. Don’t feel like you need to make it something too related to your actual business. Any kind of gift can be great as long as it’s something that people can get emotionally invested in. Clothes, books, stickers, accessories— these are all examples of good kinds of gifts. T-shirt company Qwertee reached 300,000 new Facebook likes by giving away shirts.

(Source: Wishpond)

Then, set up a promotion through your Facebook page (here’s how). Make sure to read Facebook’s promotion guidelines and then decide how you want people to access your promotion.

Because we’re talking about Facebook likes in this article, that’s what you’ll want to pick. Then every like that you get will be an entrance into your sweepstakes!

5. Run Social Cross-Promotion

Facebook is the “front door” of the internet the way that Google was back in the early 2000s. Facebook is where people go when they first get online, and it’s where they go when they’ve exhausted their energy everywhere else. It’s the hub, and everything else is spokes.

What that means is that you need to be thinking about how you can use your other social channels to drive traffic to Facebook. Cross-promoting is easy when you start doing it. All you have to do is use a few simple integrations to get people to your hub.

You want to bring users down the funnel to the places where they’re most likely to convert—namely, Facebook.

How To Do It

The key is to separate out your content by the platform that it’s going on. You should be keeping your longer, text-based posts and videos on Facebook, as well as any other kind of content that can’t fit in 140 characters or a snapshot.

It doesn’t take much for someone to come across one of your company’s tweets. But it’s not very likely that they’re going to buy one of your products as a result. You just can’t get as much information across on Twitter:

You can get way more across on Facebook, and build a much richer conversation around individual pieces of content:

The cost of advertising may still be a bit high on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use tweets to drive traffic to your Facebook page. The same goes for platforms like Instagram and Tumblr. On those, you should link to your Facebook wherever you can and use them to publicize your posts.

The New Funnel

Bring people to your Facebook page, get them amped up to “Like” you, and you will have something way more valuable than a “social following.”

People don’t realize that Facebook is way more than just a social media platform at this point. They gush about email on the one hand, and it’s true—getting email subscribers is a very powerful way to build and nurture a customer base—but they fail to realize that Facebook is starting to play a similar role to email when it comes to marketing.

Marketing is all about relationships, and a Facebook Like is the beginning of a great relationship with your customers. When you get that Like, you officially have their ear—now it’s up to you to figure out what to do with it.