Best strategy to get Facebook fans for offline client fanpage?

Ask people from the area to advertise the page.

Fan pages are only useful if you have some good interaction going on and a clear purpose.

Why does this business want a fan page in the first place? Just to say they have it? To get sign-ups to a mailing list? To drive people over to their website?

That's you first step. How can the page benefit the customer.

Depending on the goal, you can explore a few different options to get more fans, such as contests (get 3 of your friends to like my page and win a free ipad)

The fan page itself needs to be interactive if it's going to be of any use at all. That's very difficult to outsource. However, you can teach the client how to do that. Fans want to hear from the business, not some totally faceless outsourcer.

One last concern. If this is a purely local business, are there enough potential fans to make this an active page? Again, figure out the goal of the page first.

Here is what we used to get a client from 160 fans to over 700 now in about 3 months.

-Started responding to each and every comment that was left on the fanpage
-Started posting engaging content. Pictures and videos work great
-Created deals specifically to facebook
-Pushed the customers to "Like" us when they come in to visit
-Put signed throughout the place telling ppl to "Like" us
-We use the 9 to 1 ratio. 1 completely off subject post to every 9 business related post (ex. How about those Patriots losing??)
-Lastly, we run a "Once we get over 600 fans we'll give X away". The client has a diminishing asset which mean if you don't use it you lose it like. For example, if a hotel room doesn't rent out for one night you can never get that profit back. So for this contest we gave away something that was VERY low costing to us, but showed BIG value to the customers.

That's just a quick rundown of what we did and I can tell you it's still working pretty good right now.

As always, feel free to PM me if you have any questions!

Hope that helps!

Sean

If it's a restaurant or something like that, a place where people come in; I can recommend you use QR Codes. You can generate one here:

QR Code Generator from the ZXing Project

Just set Contents to "URL" and type in the fan page url. Print the QR Code out with an attractive graphic around it and put it in recognizable places in the restaurant. People will be able to scan it and like the fan page while they're waiting.

If the company isn't a place where people come in, you could try these techniques:
- Put a Like button on their website
- Advertise on Facebook (you can target down to your city or region)
- Ask the people who have contact with their clients to put a link to the Fan Page in their email signature (if that's the way they have contact with their clients).
- If they have some kind of client database, let them contact these clients with the announcement they are on Facebook.

Hope this helps!
~Jelle

There are many ways to make your fan page famous and popular on facebook.

You start posting jokes, funny pics on the other pages who have many likes.Obiviously your page will be publ;ished on the other high likes pages.

you can ask your facebook freinds to promote your page.

If your goal is to get a bunch of fans fast then running a contest or sweepstakes will provide best short term solution.
Keep in mind all the other stuff in this thread is good stuff to do, but getting several hundred new fans in a short timeframe will usually buy you "goodwill" time as you are building.

I have been dealing with Local Business/ Facebook Fan Page Marketing for quite sometime now. Here is a short video that I did for when I speak to local business owners. Here are some tips and tricks that will help. Enjoy...

Great tips. I found the responses to be helpful to get more interaction out of my own fan page. It is truely a work in progress. Good Luck with your client/s.