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I’m a huge fan of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Besides being an avid fan, I used to work there as a national host and producer for its CBC Radio One network. So it came sort of naturally that I started a fan page on Facebook for it. Not even two years later, and the Page now has 48,000 very engaged fans — far more than any other CBC page (official or not). Sometimes it’s so busy that within 15 minutes of posting something on the page, more than a hundred people have commented on it.

If you’d like to grow your page zero to 48,000 fans, here are some tips I recommend:

Set Up an Auto-Publishing Twitter Account

Facebook lets you automatically tweet out page updates onto a Twitter account, so I established @aboutcbc on Twitter and it serves as a promotional channel — whenever I post something on the Page, this account tweets out the post with a direct link to the post. This reminds people to check the Page and, if they’re not already following the page, to Like it.

Follow Lots of Obscure Content Sources

In my feed reader, I have a tonne of sources that publish content about the CBC — sources like the CBC’s official news web site and some program web sites. But I find the links that generate the most engagement come from sort of obscure sources. For instance, I follow this great (but horribly designed) blog about the Canadian radio industry, this blog for a band calledPeter Mansbridge and the CBCs (totally unrelated to the CBC), and follow an RSS search for CBC on eBay. I find the more random and offbeat the content, the more engagement happens.

Here’s an example of a recent eBay find:

I wish eBay had an affiliate program — usually things I post from eBay on the Page sell within minutes. Here’s another example: Note the last comment of someone telling everyone they’d bought it:

Actively Engage

A few hours after I post something on the page, I usually try to go back and engage in a little conversation with some of the commenters. This, of course, drives more comments and the engagement loop remains solid. Putting a little bit of you in the page goes a long way to humanizing the content.
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