Facebook Growth: How to Create Huge Facebook Communities Without Advertising

Wondering how to grow your Facebook following without resorting to paid advertising?

Want to discover the secrets to getting more fans and driving them to your blog?

To learn how one marketer has built several massive Facebook communities, all through organic growth, I interview Collin Cottrell.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Collin Cottrell, the founder of WhitetailOverload.com, a website dedicated to deer hunting. He's quickly built a massive following of more than 800,000 fans on his Facebook page, all without advertising. Collin also founded OutdoorOverload.com.

In this episode Collin will explore how he built his Facebook pages rapidly, without using paid advertising.

You’ll discover how to cross-promote your Facebook pages to grow your following and what types of posts get the most attention.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher. How to subscribe/review on iPhone.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Growth
Collin's background

Collin, who grew up in the Midwest, started hunting with his dad at an early age. He would go to hunting camps with his father and uncles, and they would sit around the campfire, tell stories about hunting and talk about life. Collin found he had a passion for hunting, and wanted to figure out how to make a living from it.

In high school Collin started building websites, doing graphic design and using social media (at the time it was MySpace and the beginning of Twitter) to build his way into the hunting outdoor industry. For example, he worked on Bowhunting.net (which was on AOL in 1994 and then launched fully in 1996). Collin also attended hunting and outdoor trade shows, such as the Archery Trade Show, where he would interview the different dealers and put the videos on their websites.

The hunting industry needed a new way to market to their growing customer base with social media, Collin says, and that’s how he found his niche.

At the same time Collin was going to trade shows, he was building his own marketing company on the side. Developing relationships with major players in the hunting industry was a huge boost to his business.

Listen to the show to discover the similarity between how Collin and I got started, even though we're in very different niches.

Collin's start on Facebook

Around 2007, Collin launched a graphics/web design/marketing agency with a focus on the hunting and outdoor industry. Facebook pages were just being introduced, so Collin decided to create hunting-related pages to build communities.

In addition to the bowhunting page, he started pages for shed hunting, turkey hunting and more.

Facebook was different at the time, Collin recalls. If you put out good content, and you had a good following, you could reach a lot of people. He put interesting, informative, value-driven content on the page, such as questions, pictures and videos.

A short time later, Collin decided to create a whitetail deer hunting page, since it’s the top tier in the hunting industry in America. He did crossovers from the other pages to get fans to the new one. This Facebook page grew organically very quickly through contests, content and posting several times a day.

A year and a half ago, when they were at 500,000 fans, they were able to reach 25 to 50 million people a month. Whitetail Overload launched August 1, 2014.

Since Collin is a web and graphic designer, he was able to build landing pages and apps for his giveaways right in Facebook, which drove people to his pages, as well as other large hunting-related niche pages.

Giveaways, Collin shares,