Misconceptions of Facebook Marketing

More ‘likes’ does not necessarily translate to more sales or a stronger brand.

When comes to Facebook marketing strategy, many business owners have a misconception of playing a game of ‘likes’. Whoever has more ‘likes’ in their Facebook page wins the game.

The truth is, having more ‘likes’ does not necessarily translate to a strong brand that generate more sales to your business.

To begin with, let us look into differences between ‘like’ and ‘follow’ in Facebook pages.

Differences between Like and Follow

When someone likes a Facebook page, the page will be displayed as being liked in their public profile. By default, he or she will automatically follows the page and receive content from the page in their personal news feed.

However, if they are not interested in the content, they can choose to un-follow the page.

In short, there are three ways people can support your page.

Fans who liked and followed your page – They want to be seen supporting your brand and are keen to receive your content in their news feed.

Fans who liked but un-followed your page – They are not interested to receive your content in their news feed, but wish to be seen supporting your brand.

Followers who did not like your page – They wish to receive your content but didn’t want to be seen supporting your brand.

Obviously, we want to have more fans who like and follow our pages because they are most likely to be our potential prospects for our business. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean people who like and follow our pages are genuinely interested in your products or services.

In my opinion, there are generally six types of people who like and follow Facebook pages.

6 Types of People who Like and Follow Pages

1. Your Client/Customer Base

Pretty straight forward. These are customers who wish to support your brand because they love your products/services and want to know the latest updates.

2. Brand Affiliated Fans

People who are genuinely interested in your brand but not necessarily interested in your products at the immediate stage. Eg: I might like Lamborghini but I may not buy a Lamborghini at this immediate point of time.

3. Product Affiliated Fans

People who are interested in the same category of products/services you are offering. Some of them also like your page because they are interested in your content and wish to be educated more about the product.

4. Worshipers

People who wish to be associated with someone who likes your business page such as their employers, business partners and associates.

5. Family and Friends

Basically, they are your friends who like your business page just to support and increase the numbers of likes on your page. Many business owners invite their family and friends to like their Facebook page just because they don’t like to see a page with a low number of fans.

6. Fake ‘Likes’

Yes. There are fake fans on Facebook who probably ‘like’ your Facebook page due to incorrectly paid advertisement practices. There are also business owners who are guilty of purchasing ‘likes’. This is the most damaging group of fans and I will touch more about it later.

Why are we focusing on types of people who like and follow our Facebook pages?

Do you know, unlike your personal Facebook account, when you post an article on your Facebook page, not all fans who like your Facebook page will receive it?

Understanding Organic Reach

Organic outreach refers to the percentage of fans on your Facebook page who can read your posts in their Facebook feed naturally without any paid advertisements.

Due to the massive amount of content uploaded daily, Facebook has been reducing the organic reach for pages especially in the last few years. Apparently, this is how Facebook earns money. Facebook does not release the official statistics of organic reach. By the rule of thumb, Facebook pages with more followers will have lower organic reach.

A recent study in 2017 has shown that the average organic reach for Facebook pages more than 500,000 followers is at 1-2%.

Of course, there are many factors that determine your organic outreach.

For example, having a great content marketing strategy is absolutely vital if you wish to increase your organic reach. You need to produce relevant content to your audience so they are more likely to like, comment and share these posts to reach out to a bigger audience.

On the other hand, this is why we want to reduce the number of fans liking our Facebook page for all the wrong reasons such as friends and family, fake followers etc as they dilute our organic reach. At the same time, they are also less likely to engage in your content, further reducing your organic outreach.

Family and friends who liked your page via invitations actually dilute your organic reach if they are not relevant to your business.

You will also realize it is less effective to reach out to all followers in your page via paid advertisements since there is a portion of the audience who have zero value to your business. Page Lookalike Audience will most probably not work well if you want to target audience which has the same traits to your Facebook Page.

The negative impact is tremendous.

Sadly to say, there is NO EASY WAY to remove these group of fans especially fake likes unless you decide to remove these likes one by one and it is too time consuming to assess these followers one by one.

To find out where are your fans from, you may visit insights from your Facebook page. Many of the fake ‘likes’ come from India, Egypt and Indonesia. If your business is based locally but has an unhealthy rate of dubious likes from the mentioned countries in your Facebook page, I’m afraid a very little percentage of your content is reaching to true real consumers. A simple check of these fake accounts is that some of these accounts have liked more than 3,000 pages without any engagement on their profile.

That definitely doesn’t sound normal.

Growing Real Engaging Fans

That’s why we always preach to business owners and marketeers that they shouldn’t be too impatient in gaining Facebook page fans and should always aim to do it right in the beginning.

For example, we do not recommend inviting all your friends to like your page just because you need social proof for your business. You should be only inviting friends who are relevant to your business to ‘like’ your Facebook page.

Always remember good content is still the king of social media.

For example, we curate this piece of article specially for business owners who are unfamiliar with Facebook marketing and could be interested in our digital marketing services. Through such articles, we educate the followers on our Facebook page and prepare them into our digital sales funnel.

I hope this article helps you to understand a little better. What are your thoughts, be sure to leave your comments below.