Table of contents
Gaining new ‘Likes’ can be useful if you’re working with Facebook. But be careful not to turn likes into the ultimate goal of your social strategy.
In today’s world, much to the dismay of many, social networks have become an essential tool for every business aiming to grow its online presence. Having a Facebook page around which to build a community of interested and loyal users (pay attention to these terms, we’ll get back to them) is now a fundamental element to consider in your marketing strategy.
However, effectively using a Facebook page also means being able to evaluate its performance: understanding how to read and interpret statistics, and giving the right weight to various elements that determine its success. Among the many indicators that help us understand if our social activity is working, there’s one in particular that deserves a closer look: the size of the fan base.
For many, the number of ‘Likes’ obtained by their page seems to be the sole important performance indicator, the ultimate goal of their digital strategy. And the absence of likes often leads to unjust criticisms directed at their Social Media Manager.
But are we really sure that the success of a page and the number of obtained likes are so closely connected?
To understand if the size of the fan base truly matters, let’s delve into how those famous ‘thumbs up’ can be beneficial when working with Facebook.
1. A Matter of Trust
The first reason why having a decent number of likes is important is quite simple: fans enhance consumer trust and credibility in a brand.
If, while on a trip in a foreign city, you feel hungry, you won’t enter a quiet, deserted tavern; instead, you’ll likely rely on the 5-star reviews on TripAdvisor. This same social dynamic influences our behavior on social media:
just like in any context, on Facebook, we tend to trust others’ opinions and prefer places (real or virtual) that are already frequented by many.
For a business page, a solid fan base acts as a good introduction, allowing users to trust and connect with the brand more easily.
2. Fans Help You Understand Your Audience
Paying attention to your fan base is also important for strategic reasons. Knowing the profiles of the people who follow you can provide you with a clearer idea of the composition, preferences, and characteristics of your audience.
Essentially, it can help you better define your buyer persona, your typical customer.
Understanding which users have chosen to follow your page in the past can give you a clearer idea of the target audience to focus your future social campaigns on. If 90% of the likes come from France, it would be pointless to allocate your budget to campaigns targeting a Spanish audience. And it doesn’t matter how much you love tapas, sangria, and flamenco!
Furthermore, the feedback from your followers can help you optimize your ad creatives.
This point is crucial: our tastes don’t always match those of our clients. For an advertising campaign, a post that has garnered more reactions, comments, and shares, even organically, is likely to perform better.
3. Your Fan’s Friend Is a Potential Fan
Lastly, Facebook’s algorithms reward pages with a higher number of likes.
To ensure easy navigation and prevent turning the feed into a huge advertising carousel, Facebook allocates a limited interface space for advertising. We discussed this in one of our recent articles.
The obvious outcome of having limited space and numerous ads is that they are selected based on certain criteria set by Facebook.
Among these criteria, one is the social context of the ad.
What does this mean? Let’s give an example.
Imagine that Ulysses, one of your Facebook contacts, has ‘Liked’ the page of Itaca.it, the travel agency he recently went on vacation to Greece with.
Let’s also assume that Itaca.it has just created an ad to promote Circe: the new low-cost cruise in the Aegean Sea.
Even if you’re not familiar with the travel agency, because you’re friends with Ulysses, you’re more likely to see Itaca.it’s ad on your feed (with a note saying, ‘Ulysses likes this page’) rather than ads from other pages with no common contacts.
In practice, your fan’s friends are more likely to see your ads compared to other users.
This is also because Facebook’s algorithms tend to favor pages with a large, active, and targeted fan base.
The reason why ‘engagement’ or ‘traffic’ campaigns are usually accompanied by ‘fan acquisition’ campaigns is precisely this: having many followers increases your page’s score. This leads to easier circulation of your ads, ultimately reducing the cost per result of your campaigns.
In summary, more likes mean better performance with lower expenses.
Facebook’s Not Just About Likes
We’ve seen why having a reasonable number of ‘thumbs up’ can be helpful in improving your social performance.
Now, take a step back and engrain a fundamental concept in your mind: the success of a Facebook page is not measured by the number of ‘Likes’ obtained!
Always remember that increasing your followers, in and of itself, does not bring any benefits to your business. Likes are a means, but they shouldn’t become the end goal of your digital strategy.
Instead, the end goal should be to turn your social media presence into a tangible business resource. To do this, it’s not enough to just grow your fan base; you need to transform it into a community of engaged users who can potentially become customers.
Some strategies, like inviting all your friends to ‘Like’ the page or, worse, buying fan packages, make no sense and are utterly useless. It’s better to have a modest but engaged and loyal following, rather than a large number of fans who will never make it to the bottom of the purchase process.
Analyzing a Facebook page’s performance means taking into account various factors, such as post reach, the quantity and quality of comments, shares, campaign trends, and costs per result. Not just obsessively monitoring the number of likes obtained day after day.
Clear on everything? Great! Now, go apologize to your social media manager!
Table of contents
