Page likes means sales right? So if more people like your page then you make more sales. So you should get as many people as possible to like your page. After all it makes sense, the more likes the better, how can this possibly be wrong?
But wait
Facebook page likes don’t matter.
At least not the wrong kind of page likes, you need the right kind of page likes and you don’t need huge numbers of likes to generate the sales you need.
In the old days of Facebook, how many likes your page had determined how successful it was, the more likes, the better. It didn’t matter if people didn’t have any interest in anything you did, as long as you had lots and lots of page likes. So you could find a lot of networking posts where everyone signed up, liked everyone else’s pages and saw their business get a boost by starting to appear at the top of everyones news feeds. It was really easy!
Facebook has come a long, long way since then, and page likes don’t matter as much anymore. In fact, having too many likes from people who don’t really have an interest in what you do can be really damaging.
That’s right, too many likes from people who are not genuine followers of your page can actually harm your success.
It’s just not as easy anymore to get your posts into someones feed, now you have to do more work and attract the right kind of people to your page and who are genuinly interested in what you’re offering.
Facebook these days is interested in how much engagement your posts are getting. So you will only be seen as a good page if you create posts that your audience feel compelled to interact with by reacting to them or even better, by commenting on and sharing them. There just isn’t nearly as much emphasis in how many page likes a business has.
But even so Facebook will only show your posts to a very small percentage of the people who like your page. So if you have a tonne of people liking your page, who aren’t interested in what you make, then your post is getting wasted. With such a small chance of your post getting seen, you need to make every page like count. You need those likers to be genuinely interested in you and your creations and to be engaging with your posts with reactions, comments and best of all, shares.
You need people to like your page who are actually interested in what you’re buying. So putting it out there saying “Hey, like my page and help me get started”, is really really tempting because you know, we all like to see that nice number growing. But having people like your page for the sake of it is actually damaging in the long term. Having a large number of page likes is great for boosting your ego, but it doesn’t do anything to actually grow your sales.
These days, the number of likes your page has is a vanity number. It’s there to kind of stroke your ego, after all who wouldn’t feel proud of having thousands upon thousands of likes and see that number keep increasing? It doesn’t really have any meaning though, and it doesn’t increase your bank balance or affect the number of orders coming in. Forget the vanity number. Make sure it’s quality over quantity.
You can make more sales with a page with 200 page likes all from an interested audience than you can with a page with 10,000 likes whose audience is built on like for like networking, so they have a very uninterested audience.
So how do you get the right people liking your Facebook page?
Engaging content is the key. Although Facebook will only show a small percentage of your audience any single post, if that post gets lots of likes and comments Facebook will let more people see it. A post with lots of interaction is a good piece of content, which means that it will keep people engaged on the platform. Facebook likes this as it keeps people on Facebook for longer. So Facebook will show your content to not only more of your audience, but will show it as recommended content to others who like pages like yours. This puts you in front of a NEW audience as well!
If that’s not an incentive to really think about what you’re posting I don’t know what is.
What to do about uninterested likes
There’s nothing wrong with having a purge. You can delete people from your page and remover their like I would target those who haven’t interacted with any posts in the last six months. Any sooner than that and you risk deleting interested lurkers – people who prefer to watch than join in, but are waiting for the right time to make a purchase from you.
What is engaging content?
Engaging content is anything that excites your audience enough to leave a reaction or a comment. Anything that causes your audience to take action is seen as engaging content. How often do you react to a post or leave a comment when scrolling through your Facebook feed? You probably do it quite a lot with posts from friends, but far less often when it comes to posts from businesses. So you need to really think about what you post and make it compelling enough to stand out in the feed.
What to do about uninterested likes
There’s nothing wrong with having a purge. You can delete people from your page and remover their like I would target those who haven’t interacted with any posts in the last six months. Any sooner than that and you risk deleting interested lurkers – people who prefer to watch than join in, but are waiting for the right time to make a purchase from you.
Does this apply to groups?
No, this is only a problem on pages. Groups are unaffected by the percentage problem, so grow those groups as much as you can
So ignore the urge to ask for page likes from anyone who is willing to help you and instead get in front of your target audience with some compelling, action inducing content
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