I bought 5000 likes for my Facebook page in addition to about 300 that I had from posting my page to random Facebook groups and doing swaps with other businesses for likes. So far it hasn’t helped me even make one extra sale. What am I doing wrong?
James Marshall Staff answered 10 years ago
Hi Richard, Unfortunately these types of strategies are not going to help you achieve any extra sales and tend to cause more harm than good to your Facebook business page. We put together a post a while ago covering the negative effects of like for like schemes, similar to the activities you have mentioned.
The Edgerank algorithm that Facebook has implemented to stop people from cheating the system can end up punishing business pages with huge amounts of followers but very few interactions from these fake followers by showing their posts to fewer and fewer people. Meaning the chances of your legit followers seeing your posts will decrease (unless of course you boost your posts).
If your not willing to pay for the privilege of having your posts shown to a new audience then there are a variety of other methods to building your social media following. If you don’t mind mixing business with your personal account, try sharing page posts via your profile. Personal profiles get much greater visibility than pages so this can be handy when you’re just starting out and looking to build your audience.
Creating a group can also help to gain an extra bit of exposure as the Edgerank algorithm tends to favour these types of posts and members of your group will automatically have notifications turned on for your group which is not the case for business pages. Try and use your group as a platform for discussion rather than a way to self promote as you want people to see value in being part of your brand’s community.