Wondering how many people are on Facebook?
A staggering 1.44 billion! (That’s right, heaps!)
That’s right, Facebook has more users than China has people (the biggest country in the world).
Right now, you’re either elated to have such a massive prospective audience, or you’re concerned you don’t know how to get them to like your Facebook page.
But hold on a minute – having a large number of page likes doesn’t matter much anymore.
Let me explain…
Why don’t page likes matter?
Don’t get me wrong, having likes is a good thing. It can even add credibility to your page.
But have you ever been prompted by Facebook to promote your page and pay to get more likes? It’s a pretty effective way to get an instant following. But it comes with a catch.
You see, the thing about paying for page likes is that they’re not always high-quality. In fact, they can be kind of meaningless. In many cases, the majority of the page likes you’ve paid for can be from people who don’t actually care about you. (Ouch!) And bottom line – if they don’t care about you, they won’t engage with you.
Page likes don’t matter if you don’t have engagement.
People should find and like your page because they genuinely like your business, not because they saw your ad.
Tell me more about engagement – why is it so important?
Got your audience responding to your post? Good – that’s engagement.
There’s three kinds of engagement:
- Likes: Someone has seen your post, appreciated its content, and hit that ‘like’ button. It’s good, solid, entry-level engagement.
- Comments: Now we’re talking. Comments are next level. Someone has taken the time to join the discussion, or tag someone they think should see the post.
- Shares: You’ve hit the engagement jackpot. People like your post enough that they want to pass it on to their individual networks!
Likes, comments and shares are used by Facebook to measure how interesting or relevant your content is. And if it’s interesting and relevant to your audience, there’s a good chance it’s interesting and relevant to your follower’s friends, too.
Good engagement will get you more reach
And reach is what you’re really after. (Not page likes.)
You see, reach is the number of individual people who have seen your content.
So when you create engaging content and it gets liked, commented on and shared, your posts will start popping up on the newsfeeds of people who aren’t familiar with your business.
It’s a far more effective way of growing a following – and one that actually cares about you.
Need post inspiration for creating engaging content?
Check out our article, 29 excuses to update your Facebook page.
