Occasionally, a Facebook friend will send me a link: please like my Facebook page. I hate getting those requests. Makes me sound mean-spirited, doesn’t it? But it’s really not. You see, if friends or family really want to succeed in business and want to use Facebook to help them promote it, then the last thing they need is for me to up the number of likes to their page.
Let me explain.
Numbers Are Not Everything
Many of us have been led to believe that numbers mean everything when it comes to social media. We see plenty of articles along these lines: how to increase Facebook likes, how to increase your number of Twitter followers. But this is missing a very important aspect to promoting your business on social media. What is really going to help your business is engagement.
Understanding Engagement For Your Facebook Page
Below is a graphic from my Facebook page. You can see that the top graphic shows very little engagement. Very few people commented on the post, shared or liked it. What was the end result? Only 81 people got to see that post. That’s a pretty poor promotion. Below is a different graphic. This time, I had a lot of people comment, share and like the post in question, and it got seen by 371 people. So engagement is important. If you want to get your message spread far and wide, you need your customers to interact with you.
What’s really interested about how Facebook works at the moment is that it rewards you for engagement. When you create a new post for your business page, only a very small percentage of your followers get to see it. If Facebook sees lots of people interacting with your post, it will begin to show that post to are far greater percentage of your fans. So it really does pay to have great posts.
Stop Asking Your Friends!
So this brings me back to my original point. If you are asking friends to like your page, and they are not your target audience, what are the chances that they are going to interact with your page? Well, chances are they won’t. They liked your page to be nice, to be a good friend, but if its of no interest to them, they will simply become another number on your page and actually lower your engagement rate when you create new posts. And that can actually harm your business. So that is the reason its so important to not go fishing for likes (if you really want to boost your likes, go for a low cost advertising campaign instead – you can read more about HOW in this post). I’ve said this before in previous posts and I’ll say it again: always go for quality over quantity.
What To Read Next
This Facebook engagement issue is getting worse and worse, especially as some of my posts can have shares but the next post will have barely 10 people even seeing it…. It doesn’t make sense until you see the ‘boost this post’ button seems to be getting bigger and bigger…
I agree. This does, unfortunately, seem to be a growing pattern. What I’m doing at the moment is following a couple of other pages (you can do this by going to the insights tab and clicking on ‘pages to watch’. One of the women I’m following has an insane engagement rate (at the moment, it’s about 20% of her followers) so I’m ‘stalking her page’ because Facebook provides insights into which posts are getting a really high engagement. It’s worth trying this. It’s starting to give me an idea as to what sort of posting pattern tends to get the best level of engagement.