Why Too Many Facebook Likes Hurt Your Page

In one of my Facebook groups, I saw a thread about buying Facebook likes. Some hadn’t heard of it, and I was very happy to see that the general consensus was that it’s a bad idea.

Here’s my two cents.

Some people buy likes because of vanity, others because it gives them an appearance of legitimacy. For example, there are some companies who won't work with you unless your page has a reached a certain number of likes.

The fact is, besides being dishonest, buying likes instead of getting likes organically (naturally) actually REALLY hurts your page. 

You know all those people who complain about their page content not being seen since FB changed now newsfeeds work? They actually changed it so that what you see in your feed is based on what you will most likely enjoy the most. This is based off of your FB activity and the popularity of posts. If there’s a friend or page you’ve interacted with, FB is more likely to show you posts from that friend or page. If a page you’ve interacted with posts something, you’re more likely to see it, especially if it’s been liked, shared, or commented on. That likelihood goes up if your friends engaged with that post. Likewise, if there’s a FB page that you’ve liked but haven’t interacted much, but their post is very popular, FB is more likely to put it in your newsfeed.

Businesses are finally realizing that engagement rather than likes more accurately reflects a page's performance. When you inflate your number like that, with people who have absolutely no interest in your page, your ratio of page likes to engagement goes WAY down. So, if someone is looking into working with you and they see only 3 out of 2000 fans actually engaged with your posts (liked, shared, or commented), they won’t be impressed.

Another problem is that many of the likes that people might buy come from fake accounts. Facebook actually screens accounts to find these fakes ones and deletes them. If your page likes have been inflated by a bunch of dummy accounts, and those accounts get deleted, your number of likes will drop dramatically. And that really doesn’t look good...

Bottom line, page likes aren’t nearly as important as engagement. If you have just a few likes but a LOT of engagement, your posts will be popping up all over the place because your ratio is so high. On the other hand, if you have a lot of likes and very little engagement, no one will see you.

-Laura 

I'll be posting more about using Facebook soon. In the mean time, sign up for my email updates so you'll be in the loop. 

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