There are so many ways you can start to grow your Facebook business page following when you’re first starting out. However, don’t expect to have thousands of fans within a few months. It does take time to build up. It’s worth reading Quick tips for making the most of Facebook at this point, if you haven’t already.

Here are 5 ways you can grow your Facebook business page following:

1. The friend factor

When you first set up your page, the best way to begin growing is to ask your friends and family who follow your personal profile to follow your page. Most people are more than willing to help you get started – and it sure beats talking to yourself on your Facebook page.

2. Quality content

Provide quality content that will educate, entertain or inspire your fans. However, don’t overpromote. This will vary between businesses, but 2-3 posts a day is a good guide to ensure your fans don’t start unfollowing you. People don’t tend to like businesses clogging up their newsfeed. On the other hand, if you underpromote, you run the risk of never being seen in people’s newsfeed (see the post on Facebook’s algorithm). Work out what posting schedule works for you and your audience. With it being harder to gain exposure in the newsfeed, it doesn’t hurt to experiment with post volume (as long as it’s still quality) to see what the boundaries are with your audience.

3. Bring people in from other platforms

There is a bit of debate about your website and blog posts having social media buttons attached to allow people to click through to your page. The goal is really to keep people on your site, not drive them away to social media where they’ll easily be distracted, never to return. Personally, I think it’s a good idea to have social media icons in your sidebar or footer, but just ensure they’re not the first thing people see. Make sure they consume your content and then sign up to your newsletter before they leave. Don’t forget your emails too, where you can leave a link in your email signature.

4. Have a call to action

Have a call to action – ie, ask them to do something after consuming your Facebook content. I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s a great way to build your following. When you ask people to like, comment or share your post and they actually do it, you get viewed in their “ticker’’ – which means more opportunities for people to follow you. Having people “share” your post is the ultimate, because you appear in their ticker, newsfeed and homepage.

5. Interact with other pages

This is similar to how to build a blog, but interacting with other pages is important in building relationships. It used to be that you could tag another page in your status and they would get a notification of this. Now, that doesn’t happen. However, you can still click the “share’’ button on something they’ve posted (as long as it’s quality content and will resonate with your audience) and interact with them by leaving a (non-spammy) comment that adds to the conversation on their status updates. To find pages, use Facebook’s search option.

Join the Media Mastermind Facebook group, where we talk about strategies and tools to grow your Facebook page reach. Oh, did I mention it’s FREE!

What other tips do you have for building your page following?