Let’s bust a few Facebook marketing myths right away:

You can’t grow your “likes” and “fans” in 3 months starting today.

You can’t bulldoze your way through it.

Throwing money at it won’t buy you love and hence you can’t grow your fans by buying them.

You can’t force someone to “like” your business page on Facebook.

Yet, Facebook fan page likes are precious. For one, Facebook fan pages promise a “viral spread” for your content. When fans “like” something, your content spreads into their friends’ list and so on. Further, fan page “likes” also have a possible dollar value associated with it.

Here are some smart ways to get likes using traditional, good old hustle instead of gaming the system.

No. 1: Keep your Facebook Fan page populated, always

No one likes an abandoned Facebook fan page. Also, it’s hard to retain likes and keep fans when your Facebook fan page content comes up in spurts with gaps ranging from days to months. On the other, 20 updates in an hour or 100 updates in a day is sure to have your fans (those that exist now) to “unlike you”.

As you can see, your content schedule requires a delicate balance. Stick with a regular 10 posts a day, everyday for 20 days a month. Also, schedule these posts within the day such they are published at intervals of 2 hours per piece of content.

No. 2: Like to get liked

Unless you are CocaCola, Fedex, BMW, or Starbucks, not many people are going to find you on Facebook. For startups, small businesses, bloggers, and individuals with Facebook fan pages (promoting a cause maybe?), life’s impossible without hustle. If you need likes on your Facebook Fan page, you’ll have to go out and spread some love. Get altruistic. Find Facebook Fan Pages where your target audience (or the closest group of people to your target audience) is likely to be present and like each of these pages.

Just as it is for real relationships, the fans that like your Facebook fan page know how to reciprocate. For that to happen, you got to give.

No. 3: Engage, comment, and contribute on other Fan pages

Just “liking” a target Facebook fan page (in the hope of someone liking your own fan page) is as good as storing contact information with no intentions of calling up, meeting, or initiating a conversation. After liking a set of pages, go out to each page and get active. Engage with the community there, comment on updates where you think you can contribute, and keep those pages active with your inputs.

Think about what’s happening here: If you like 10 other Facebook fan pages and leave 20 comments across these pages, your Facebook footprint grows by at least 200 impressions each month. Do this for 6 months and you get 1200 permanent impressions on Facebook without spending a dime, while you’d be spending your time. Guerilla marketing is also about trading time instead of money.

Just as in forums and Q & A sites, people notice your comments and contributions on all these other Facebook fan pages. You never know when they’d begin to check your own fan page out and probably like you.

No. 4: Comment on other blogs using Facebook Comments

Did you notice that leading online publications have Facebook comments enabled? For instance,Inc.com uses Facebook comments.

Why not leave some intriguing, thoughtful, and helpful comments beneath those posts? Many more online publications use Facebook comments (sometimes as alternatives to other native comment systems); take advantage of that.

Facebook comment boxes on each of these publications allow you to choose your profile before posting a comment which goes something like this: “Post this comment as ….”.

Instead of choosing your personal profile, pick up one of the Facebook Fan pages you’d like to promote and comment using that profile.

Disqus, another popular commenting system that many online publications and blogs use, also has options for you to choose the profile you’d like to use when commenting. Needless to say, pick your Facebook fan page when you’d like to promote the page instead of your Disqus profile.

Thanks to all the traffic that each of those posts on these leading publications, you have even more exposure for your fan pages.

No. 5: Dedicated Content Marketing for Facebook

When you decided to have a website, you are already thinking about promoting it. How come Facebook fan pages aren’t treated as standalone web properties? Why should blogs, eCommerce sites, and business websites get all the attention? Why should content marketing be used only for promoting these types of web properties?

You can use content marketing for promoting any type of web property, as long as there’s a link that points to it. Your Facebook fan pages are worth promoting, of course. Write up guest posts, articles, and posts and use them to promote your Facebook fan page exclusively. Of course, if you were running a blog (or a corporate blog for your business), you’d need to develop content exclusively for Facebook fan page promotions in addition to all the content development that your business demands.

No. 6: Facebook Fan Page Promotion Widgets

If you use WordPress, there are hundreds of widgets and plugins available that show up as popups when visitors reach your landing pages, websites, or blogs. Further, you could also have them “like” your Facebook fan page if they needed to access an exclusive long-form post, a whitepaper, or an eBook. Using these widgets automatically boosts the likes of your page and increases the number of fans for your page drastically. Most of these plugins require one-time purchases but are affordable at about $20-50.

No. 7: Webinars and Free giveaways

If you have something valuable to give away, you can trade that for a “like.” It’s a traditional business practice, and it still works.

Develop free reports, give away a free trial for your products or services, launch a webinar and promise a starter kit in exchange for a like (or maybe even recommend the page to 3 other friends?), etc. Make sure that for anything you give away, you have to get a Facebook fan page like in return. You could use many of the available plugins to facilitate this kind of trade.

No. 8: Make your Facebook fan page work for you

You could load your Facebook fan page with third-party widgets developed specifically for Facebook.Northsocial, for instance, has plenty of widgets and apps that you can use to create giveaways, launch contests, make Facebook exclusive offers, polls, and a whole lot more. Using such tools, you can make your Facebook fan page an Interactive page to engage with your fans better and to make your fan page a lot more “social” and “sharable”.

How do you go about promoting your Facebook fan page?

Meet Pratik Dholakiya

Pratik Dholakiya is the founder of Growfusely, a content marketing agency specializing in content and data-driven SEO. He regularly speaks at various conferences about SEO, Content Marketing, and Entrepreneurship. Pratik has spoken at the 80th Annual Conference of the Florida Public Relations Association, Accounting and Finance Show, Singapore, NextBigWhat’s UnPluggd, IIT-Bombay, SMX Israel, SEMrush Meetup, MICA, IIT-Roorkee, and other major events. As a passionate SEO and content marketer, he shares his thoughts and knowledge in publications like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, The Next Web, YourStory, and Inc42, to name a few. He can be found at Twitter @DholakiyaPratik.