Recently I’ve come across several situations where businesses are shooting themselves in the foot with their Facebook Pages!
Here’s why…
I’ve been tempted to do it myself…
And hundreds of people probably do it across the globe every week!
What am I referring to?
PAYING for Facebook Likes!
In a word (or three): “Don’t Do It!”
To quote the socialmediaexaminer.com:
“A page with thousands of Facebook fans might make a powerful first impression, but if those fans aren’t interacting with updates, that page will have a horrible time positioning itself impressively in the news feed.”
Here’s the reason:
Facebook, and social media in general is about getting engagement. Engagement then results in other social media users being exposed to your messages, and so you get to spread the word, and build credibility, authority and trust about you, your company and/or your brand. This can lead to sales down the track.
Facebook in particular uses the level of engagement as an indicator to tell them how many of your Fans they should show your posts to! That’s right, your posts don;t get put in the NEwsFeeds of 1005 of your Fans. In face your posts only get shown to an estimated 10% or less of your Fan base. So if you have 1,000 fans, less than 100 will ever even SEE your post!
But this can be increased by having great engagement on your posts.
So the number 1 goal of most Facebook posts should be to get engagement!
If you buy 1,000 fake / bodgy Fans to make your page look better, and you manage to get only 50 real Fans, then only 5% or so of your Fans can even POSSIBLY engage with what you’re posting!
Of course, the majority of even REAL Fans won’t engage, so you’re left with a situation where your Page will become what I call an Engagement Ghost Town! (Don’t worry, I have several FB Pages like that myself – shame on me!)
However if having an active and engaged FB page is a part of your marketing strategy, you can’t afford to let the aforementioned situation be the case!
How do you get engagement?
Well that could be the subject of an entire eBook in itself, and I’m certainly no world-leading expert on this topic! But here are a couple of important clues:
How to get engagement on Facebook Tip 1:
“Get Over Yourself!”
huh? What I mean by this is that I see so many social media “streams” chokka-block full of the”: “ME, LOOK AT ME…. PLEASE LOOK AT ME (P.L.A.M)!” syndome!
But the question we have to ask is: “Who cares about me (or my company)?”
Answer: Probably not as many people as we’d like to think!
Solution: Make your content / media / graphics as interesting TO YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE as you possibly can.
How to get engagement on Facebook Tip 2:
Sadly today, it’s been estimated that our attention span, especially when on social media, is only a few seconds. Because of this its been proven time and again that attractive and interesting IMAGES produce the best engagement. These can include, so-called “Memes” such as this:
…Quotes, beautiful photos of scenes, pics of people, pets, cars. etc.
In my own company’s social media accounts, I’ve found that text articles typically don’t do that well, although of course there are exceptions when the audience is fanatically enthusiastic about the niche.
If you feel that your business might benefit from having experienced social media professionals running your content for maximum engagement, drop us a line here – we have some economical social media management plans, delivered by fanatical social-media experts, with real-world results, that can turn things around quite quickly for your social media presence!
What To Do About Fake Likes:
Back to the fake Likes issue. The problem is that you may never be able to get your Facebook Page engagement off the ground, if the vast majority of your Likes are duds.
One solution is to delete the bodgy fans. It’s a bit of a big undertaking, but here’s a great article on what’s involved. Another strategy is to run an ongoing targeted “Like” campaign with Paid Facebook Ads, to build up your genuine Fan base.
Hope that helps you avoid or overcome this effectiveness-killing, but all-too-common dynamic on your Facebook Page(s).
If you need help with your social media strategy, hit me up here – we’re confident we can help!