What’s Changing with Facebook
November 5th marks a change in the way that you will be able to gain new likes. Until now, it’s been popular to incentivize people to like your page. Bloggers love to use the Facebook like as a giveaway entry. It’s a great way to grow the number of likes for a fan page. Others may entice potential fans by hiding the content of their fan page until the like button is clicked. While, in theory, this is a good way to gain interested followers, it’s going away.
In a Facebook developer blog post, this is what Facebook had to say:
You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.
Plain and simple, this means you are going to have to work to be sure that the right people are liking your page. Facebook is putting a stop to the easiest way for you to grow your number of fans. It seems like Facebook is becoming a little controlling. We talked, in an earlier post, about the Facebook algorithm change and how it affects your page. Now, they won’t let you bait folks into liking your page. What’s the deal?
How Like Gating Hurts You
Plain and simple, if people are coming to your page and clicking the like button on the off chance they might win a tablet or coffee maker, they aren’t interested in your content. They can unlike as quick as they liked. The same goes for any incentive that you offer for a like. It’s a reward and people that are liking your page just for the reward are not true fans and are probably not interested in anything you have to say. The odds that they will ever return are not in your favor.
Think about it this way: if you did a Google search for laptop giveaways and we came up in the search, giving away a brand new laptop, we’d have your attention. Right? Sure! Then you enter and the first entry requires you to like our Facebook page. That’s easy. We’ve included a button and you don’t even have to leave the page you are on. Click and done. Later on, you see us in your news feed. We’re posting articles about Facebook image sizes and that has nothing to do with you or anything that you are interested in. You are going to do one of two things.
- You will hide us from your newsfeed or
- You will unlike our page
Neither of these is helpful to us an now you see us as being spammy and you tell your friends about it. Not good.
How Facebook is Helping You
While it may seem that Facebook is taking away a legitimate way to grow your number of fans, that’s not really true. Your numbers might increase but what is their why? Are they liking your page just to get something for free or as a contest entry? If so, chances are that they don’t really care about what you are posting. They will either unlike your page or won’t be returning to see what else you share. You aren’t gaining fans that are relevant.
So, what Facebook is actually doing is help you to gain fans that are interested in you, your business and your brand. They are showing you how many fans are not relevant and where you can grow and change for continued growth. It’s a great opportunity to take on the challenge of posting relevant content. Consider starting a business blog (or picking back up where you left off) and sharing your posts on Facebook. Fresh eyes on any content is never a bad thing.
How can you take advantage of this Facebook like gate change? Where will this take your business? How can we help?
