Why Facebook Likes Matter

Over the years, the importance of likes on Facebook has gone up and down and back up again.

When you’re looking to grow your business with Facebook your likes do matter – but probably not in the way you might be thinking.

Having 5000, 10,000 or 100,000 or even a 1,000,000 people like your page won’t make much of a difference to Facebook, but . . .

. . . every one of those likes is a real person and for some reason, they decided to connect with you.

It’s a small connection but as long as you’re getting engagement on your Facebook page and you have a plan to use it, these likes all are potential customers and clients.

There is one caveat: your likes have to be genuine. If you went out and bought likes or pumped up your likes with people from other countries who will never be your customer, all you’ve done is bought social proof.

For some businesses that is all they want. They figure when you go to a site and see 100 or 200 likes you have to wonder about how popular that business really is. But if you go and see 10s of thousands of likes you think, wow this must be a popular business, and getting that wow factor is all that matters to some.

The challenge is that if you want to do more with Facebook, this big audience of people who don’t interact is killing your chance for any kind of engagement. You’d have no way to use any of the tactics we talked about in the past few posts on our blog.

Now for those of you who want more than social proof, here is why “likes” matter:

People are making a micro-commitment to you. They’re saying I’m interested enough in your message and who you are to give at least this much.

And for a first step, that is all you need.

As Facebook sees more people liking your page they will suggest your page to others who have similar likes as your page likes. This is why you want to make sure the people who like your page are legitimate prospects for your business. With the right ones to start with, your results grow. With the wrong ones, you keep digging a bigger and bigger hole to get out of.

Once you have the right people “liking” your page and you make them offers, you’re going to start seeing responses and activity from them that will help your business grow.

As they interact with your page and get to know you, they will either leave or keep moving closer to you. Eventually, they’ll leave their contact information with you which will let you email or call or send them something in the mail depending on what you offered them.

One other thing to remember is that you can target all the fans of your page and their friends any time you want. That means that even if they don’t take you up on an offer organically you can reach them with an ad.

People who have liked your page or engaged with you in any way tend to respond well to ads.

And last but not least, you can target friends of fans, and when the friend sees a post it says that so-and-so likes this, it acts as an endorsement of your page to all of the person’s Facebook friends.

Every like on your page can turn into 50 to 100 to 200 or more people you can reach.

In many cases, the friends of fans audience perform well as an audience in ads too.

As you can see there are many possibilities with the people who have “liked” your page.

All you need to do is grow these likes.

We’ve created a tool you can use to grow your Fan base and many of these ways are free or low cost. You can get it by clicking here.

Brian

P.S. If you want to have a short 10-minute conversation about how to implement this in your business, schedule time here. We’ll discuss your goals and your business, and I’ll let you know if I’m the one to help you. If we agree then we’ll schedule a longer call if not you get an ear to listen and suggestions, you can use.