Are you Liking the Road to Disaster?

Way back in 2012 i wrote my first blog post about liking ladders and boosting likes on facebook and the concerns i had about it (you can read that post here and the follow up to that post here).  Although i was running a different page back then, it was still related to selling and small businesses on facebook.

What i was witnessing back then was a massive use of so called liking ladders designed to boost the numbers of likes a facebook page has got.  I conducted an experiment back then on my own page and the results were startling and extremely significant.  Very basically after using like ladders to boost my own page likes I monitored my stats only to find there was a huge decrease in the reach of my page.

Back then i did get slated for suggesting such things by some people, but i also had many agree with my conclusions.  Fast forward now to 2014 and here i am again, preaching about chasing like figures.  The difference is this time the networking pages themselves are advising people not to like and run and using the pages just to boost likes is not a good idea.  I am extremely glad to see this as, apart from confirming i was on the right track in 2012, they are also trying to educate the page fans.

Despite all this education however i am still witnessing a huge amount of people searching for likes and celebrating their magic number.  Its difficult not to celebrate the fan base of your page growing, and indeed it is something worth celebrating - when a page is grown slowly and with care it is a very very good thing to celebrate.  In my humble opinion however when done too fast and with 'false' likes it is going to lead to disaster for that page.

Why on earth would i predict such a thing? Quite simply because i have been researching my stats yet again and conducting more experiments on the new page.  I have also armed myself with as much knowledge as i can cram into my head about the new facebook settings.

Everyone seems to be reeling about the how their reach is so low since the new changes, but i have to ask myself why these stats would be so low.  My conclusion is the important point in the equation is INTERACTION.  A useful explanation of this can be found here.



Since investigating the new facebook algorithms and doing all this research i have actually come to the conclusion that what facebook is doing is actually a good thing......(ducks to avoid things getting thrown at me lol).  No really, i do think its good because facebook is actually telling us how to improve our pages.  What they are doing with these new changes is to limit the reach of our posts to people who are genuinely interested in what we have to offer - what they are doing is actually screening out the 'false' likes.  They are teaching us we need to be more choosy about who we try to bring onto our pages and they want us to have real fans who are interested in our pages - its marketing 101 really - Identify your TARGET AUDIENCE!

So why would this lead to disaster for pages who use liking ladders etc? Well facebook will be giving pages which are deemed to be interesting by their own fans precedence over those deemed less interesting, and how they will be doing this is via a weighting system based on INTERACTION.  If a page has people who are not actually interested in the business the interaction is going to be minimal....but the more people you have on your page the more chance there is of grabbing some fans who will interact and thats a good thing right? Or is it????

I have to wonder about how the amount of people a page has as fans will be taken into consideration in these algorithms......a page with 10 people as fans who are all interacting on a regular basis would mean this page has a 'score' of 100% - they have a very targeted audience despite being small.  On the other hand if the page has 1000 people as fans and only 10 people interacting regularly it has only got a 'score' of 1% and a rather un-targeted audience.

Take this further - the page with 1000 likes continues to add more and more people who are not actually interested in their page and the situation gets worse rather than better.  In my opinion (bearing in mind i am not an expert on this) facebook will be using a system like this to determine which of the business pages get space in the already packed newsfeeds of fans......I am guessing those pages with a wide non targeted audience will soon find themselves without any access  to those who have liked their page at all.  It is just a guess, but i'm usually quite good at predicting what is to come.

Next time i will be looking at what steps business pages in this situation can do to improve their page rank and hopefully avoid the problems i suspect they will face if no action is taken.