Frequently we talk to leads who want to get to 100,000 followers on Facebook by… tomorrow. Generally these are unknown brands who believe that the way to become known is to gather masses of social media followers. Overnight. 

Here’s a real example from a Facebook community I am a part of:

Question for you ? A client is asking for 500 new followers a week on Instagram and 100 likes a day. SHE HAS NEVER gotten that kind of following and only wants me to work on this 15-20 min a day. Is this even possible?

Is it possible to get hundreds of Facebook likes that fast?

Well, everything is possible at the right price. That’s one way to answer this question. If we were to run Facebook ads, we could acquire new “likes” at an average of $1.5 per like. With good ads the cost can be lower, with bad ads, it can be higher. If I only have 15 minutes a day, you don’t get the great ads, thus the cost per like will be higher. So, to get 2,000 likes per month you should expect to invest $3,000 in ads + the time required to manage the ads.

Every marketer has to make the cost, speed and quality decision. You can’t have speed, quality and low cost. In fact, in most cases you can’t have speed and quality or quality and low cost. You have to choose what’s most important to you, and you have to be ready to take responsibility for the consequences.

So, if you only care about “likes” and you want mass volumes of them, the quickest way there is to run ads. And while you do that, ask yourselves, what comes next?

Otherwise you have to go about it the hard working way, which will not only get you the “like” but will also get you long-term loyal customers. I do see the need for a little bit of Facebook advertising today mixed in with organic marketing, because it’s close to impossible to get the same reach as two years ago. But there is no shortcut. One way or another you have to earn that “like.” And that takes work, good problem-solving and a budget.

Start today! Create great content that people want to read, ask questions that people want to answer, invite people to “like” your page at every occasion and little by little the numbers with grow. And if you do all the other things right, customer service, PR, offline marketing, SEO etc. more and more people will start finding you and the growth will accelerate. In time.