Sunday, November 9, 2014

Why you shouldn't ask for "likes" on Facebook

Along with many other Close to My Heart Consultants, I run a Facebook page for my business. It's really handy for keeping in touch with my customers to post news about current specials and upcoming events that I'm running. This post is aimed at my fellow consultants... and actually anyone who runs a Facebook page for their business.

Lots of likes is bad (sort of)
This might sound strange but having a lot of likes on Facebook is actually not necessarily good for your business. It all comes down to the reason why they liked your page in the first place. The only thing it gets you is kudos. What I mean is that if someone goes to your Facebook page and sees 700 likes, they might think, "Ooo, 700 likes, that's cool, this must be someone worth following." This is a good thing.

Other than that, the return for lots of likes is minimal, but as I said, the key is in how you got them.

When we first start up a Facebook page, we want lots of people to follow it, and most of us send out invitations to our friends and family, both near and far. Because they are our friends and family, and want to support us, they "like" our page.
The problem here is that whenever we send out news, photos, updates etc, it's only sent to a small proportion of our followers. And if a vast majority of these are friends and family hwo aren't actually interested in coming to our events and hearing about our specials, it does us little good. We're not actually getting the word out to who we want to reach.

If I have twenty followers who are all interested in coming to workshops and hearing about my news, Facebook will randomly select a percentage of these to receive my updates. (It may be as low as 10%, I couldn't find a definitive answer.) So that means maybe two of my followers hear about my events.
If I have twenty followers and sixteen of those are friends who live on the other side of the world or family who are keen to support my home business, it takes the likelihood of me getting my message out to those four remaining interested customers way down. Chances are that the two Facebook select to send out my messages to will not be those who are actively interested in my page.
If you upscale the numbers, the sinking feeling remains the same. With 100 followers, I might be lucky for my messages to be seen on 10-15 of their newsfeeds.

So how can I use my page?
I can't control who follows my page. I love finding that I have new followers. It's wonderful when someone new discovers my page and chooses to receive news from it because they're interested in what I post.
But I need to make sure that a high percentage of my followers are actually interested in the news I send out - whether it's for their own pages, their projects, or coming to my classes, etc. A like for like sake is worthless to me.
I invite ladies who I have met at gatherings to join my page.
I am also trying to more consistently send out status updates - that way, as Facebook cycles through my likers randomly, I hope that they continue to reach those who I want to reach.

Here are some really interesting articles:
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-declining-organic-reach

And here is a video that tells you why you should NEVER choose to advertise on Facebook in order to gain more likes. It's based on the same theory as I've mentioned above.

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=748822798463228&pnref=story

Happy Facebooking, All!

Jo

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