In the next couple of posts, I will be going into a lot more detail and depth about each of the different ways of getting Facebook fans, which I wrote about here. So today what I wanted to talk about was the first point – creating great content.

This is by far the most powerful weapon in attracting new fans to your Facebook fan page. If you provide value to your fans, they will engage with you. The more they engage, the more your fan page will spread virally around Facebook through fans sharing your fan page links and recommending others to like your page.

So where do we get great content to post? Let’s start off with an example. Imagine you have a Facebook fan page that talks about Apple, one of the most talked about companies going around now. This fan page will talk about the latest Apple news including when the next IPhone will be manufactured.

One way to get great content is to go to Google and click on News on the top as follows:

Now search for “Apple” and you will get multiple news results. Now scan each of the results and find something interesting. I usually find articles that I would find personally interesting to read or extremely useful. For example, for my fan page I recently posted an article talking about Google pages which has just opened up. This is massive news in the social media world.

Once you find an interesting article, grab its URL and shorten it using a URL shortener such as bit.ly or my personal favorite that I use, which is Google’s URL shortener (see below):

This is important as you want to track the number of times each URL is clicked from your post. Google’s URL shortener provides a great range of different stats including the countries where those people have clicked from.

Now going one step further, go back to the news results and on the bottom you will find an option for creating an email alert for “Apple”. Then go ahead and create an email alert and schedule it to arrive in your inbox daily. Now you have just leveraged all of the above by receiving it in your email. If you have a fan page, you want to aim to post around 3-4 times a day. This is a great way to get the latest news for your niche delivered straight into your mailbox.

I’m a big believer in leveraging your time. One of the best tools that I’ve found if you are a part of multiple social networks is HootSuite. I use the above shortened URL and plug it into HootSuite and then it posts it to all of my accounts at once – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and LinkedIn.

Another great way to get great content is to visit some websites in your niche and subscribe to their RSS feed. Plug these feeds into an RSS reader, then you will also get the latest updates from that website. Also follow the blogs of experts in your niche and share some of their articles.

One Facebook feature I highly recommend using is the question feature. This has a high EdgeRank value as I talked about here and gets your fans interacting and engaging with your fan page.

Finally, I also highly recommend sharing videos which you can easily find on YouTube or Vimeo. Keep an eye out on my next post where I’ll be talking about how to share your fan page on other fan pages without having your post deleted. Another great tactic to get more fans to your fan page.