By Warren Fowler
Facebook is the most successful social media platform at the moment. There’s no doubt about it, as the statistics consistently show that this giant social network is actively used by every gender, age, and nationality. In fact, Facebook has over 2 billion users that log in and use the platform on a monthly basis.
Therefore, Facebook proves to be an incredible marketing tool for today’s businesses. This social channel is an incredibly powerful tool that allows brands to target and reach their audience through numerous ways.
The first step of the process consists of the development of a professional business page. This will be the place where the magic will happen, as this is the spot where you’ll publish your content, engage with customers, and ultimately develop a high brand reputation. After you’ve successfully built a business page, it’s time to start gathering fans that resonate with your brand’s value proposition. Simply put, it’s time to make your Facebook page popular among the individuals who are likely to purchase your products or services.
The Importance of Facebook Fans
Facebook, like all social media platforms, is an effective channel of distribution. What is being distributed? Content. Brands are using relevant and engaging content for every thinkable reason: brand awareness, fans engagement, sales, and the list goes on.
The other elements that complete the equation: fans and posts reach. If you publish amazing content that truly provides value to your selected target audience, everything should work well, right?
Well, not necessarily. If very few people are able to see your content, the entire value of your content will go to waste. That’s why fans, likes, and followers are critical to your Facebook marketing success.
How Do You Acquire Facebook Fans?
There are more ways to improve your Facebook fan base, but we’ll separate them into three options: organic reach, paid advertising, and purchasing fans.
1. Organic Reach
When you develop your brand presence on Facebook, you’re looking to position yourself as an authority in your niche. If 100 or more competitors promote the same products, you’ll need your brand to stand out from the crowd and overcome whichever competitor stands in its way.
You can improve your organic reach by publishing great content that is very relevant and helpful to your target audience.
By doing so, your social engagement performance will increase. More people will like, comment, and share your content because it’s the best. It is above average, so it is worthy of remark.
2. Paid Advertising
The other way to gain fans and friends on Facebook is to use the paid advertising, which even though it sounds very tempting, can be an ineffective strategy that may lead to losses. I’ll explain why.
Paid advertising is an amazing way to reach a broad yet very targeted audience, especially because Facebook changes its algorithms on a regular basis, affecting the organic reach performance of all business pages. Paid advertising can provide amazing results if it’s leveraged in the proper ways, and it could damage the budget of the organization if used wrong.
Here’s when developing ads for acquiring new Facebook fans may not result in a positive ROI (return on investment):
- No Guarantee of Further Action – Your end goal is to sell your products or services. Now. If your ads encourage the user to like your page, that user will be tempted to follow that instruction only. There’s a low chance for a person who likes a page to immediately check out further website information, so you’ll end up with a like and that’s it. The proper way to do it is to spend your budget on ads that are meant to lead the traffic back to your website and present them with an offer. If you do so, you have a good chance of turning those simple visitors into email subscribers.
- Users’ Credibility – Let’s say that your ad campaign succeeds and you gather a lot of page followers. You have, let’s say, 500,000 people that liked your page, but only an average of 50 likes per published post. How do you think that looks like from the outside? People are smart; they understand whether a page has earned its followers with patience, value, and trust. If your page engagement is low because the fans are not properly introduced to your brand, you’ll damage both your organic reach and your users’ credibility.
- Wasted Money – Lastly, yet very importantly, you’ll waste your money on actions that won’t lead to concrete results. As I’ve already mentioned, tracking the behavior of a person who likes a page is impossible. However, if the person is sent to your website, you are able to track the time he spends there, the action he takes, and also his biggest interests.
So as you can see, using ads to generate likes and fans on Facebook often doesn’t turn out very well for your business. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t invest in ads, but you do need to do it wisely. Facebook ads are great as long as you strategize them properly and execute them through the lenses of analytics.
3. Buying Facebook Fans
The last and the worst way of acquiring Facebook likes and fans is to simply buy them from third-party sources. There are many companies that offer all sorts of services. You can buy page likes, friend requests, comments, shares, followers, and so on.
But why would you do that? One reason is to make your page look more popular because if more people have liked it, then it must be a benefit for your reputation, right?
Wrong. Facebook fans and targeted Facebook fans are very different from each other. Think about it – if your end goal is to make a profit through sales, you will need followers that are actually interested in buying from you. Without targeted fans, your page will lead to zero results.
Here are more reasons why fake likes and fans will hurt your marketing performance on Facebook:
- Low Engagement Rates = Lower Reach – Facebook uses a smart algorithm to detect whether a Facebook page is relevant to its followers. If you have a million fans (mostly fake), out of which only a few hundred are actively engaging with your page, Facebook will immediately decrease your organic reach showing your posts to fewer and fewer people.
- Creates Chaos – When you combine targeted likes with fake likes, you are creating a chaos from which it will be impossible to escape. You’ll never know the real value of your Facebook page as the numbers are twisted and unreliable.
- Destroys Your Analytics – Buying fans and likes will destroy any chances of analyzing your performance. Without the proper insight, you’ll never know whether your investments are profitable or not. Moreover, you’ll hardly understand what needs to be done next, and you’ll be stuck in a negative cycle.
Takeaways
Paying for Facebook fans and likes is probably not the best decision that you can make. There are other, better ways of spending your money. The best thing you can do is to improve the quality of your products and services, and the quality of your content. When you have amazing content that stands out from the crowd, you’ll manage to grab the attention of many people and improve your organic reach with ease.