How Important Are Facebook Likes To Your Business?

When Facebook first began opening its doors to businesses, creating features like Pages so that businesses could engage with users online, gaining Likes was one of the main goals. Now, however, as Facebook improves its advertising features, with the focus being on gaining engagement and reach rather than watching the little meter gradually tick over in an iframe at the top of a company’s Page, how important have likes become, or how unimportant?

From the very start, Facebook engagement has been centred around the Like button. The Facebook Like button is the easiest and quickest way someone can show appreciation of a post or a Page: just one quick click and comments from a business Page will start appearing in your News Feed. This is the key purpose of the Like button: by clicking Like, users are saying they are happy to see a business’s page content in their News Feed, potentially leading to more engagement.

However, the Like button’s simplicity is also its downside. A Like doesn’t necessarily mean that a user has properly engaged with a business, it only takes one click after all. Although Likes are often a gateway to better sorts of engagement such as comments, they don’t make further engagement a certainty. Also, if someone Likes your Page or post, there’s no real way to thank them. If someone comments on your page, it opens up the possibility of an actual conversation.

If someone Likes your Page, it won’t necessarily show up in their friends' News Feeds. A comment or a Page post is far more likely to appear in the News Feed than a Like. Likes, therefore, rarely directly effect reach, as a user’s friends won’t necessarily see the Like activity. The only place friends’ Likes regularly show up on the News Feed is in the “Add to News Feed” section, but this has been scrapped in the new News Feed design.

So, Facebook Likes help engagement and reach, but they don’t necessarily guarantee engagement and reach. How important, then, are Facebook Likes to your business? They are still very important, in fact, so important that Facebook are still releasing features to encourage users to Like Pages, features like a “Like Page” button and a “Promoted Page Likes” Feature.

At its most basic level, the more Facebook Likes a business’ Page has, the more popular it will appear to people, people who also might be encouraged to click Like. However, amount isn’t everything, businesses need to focus on getting the right Likes for their page. A few months ago, researchers at Cambridge University discovered that what people were liking on Facebook revealed a lot about their age, gender and political viewpoint.

If you get the right people to like your Page, therefore, you will instantly know a lot about your Page posts’ audience, helping you to target them with the right content. As long as they don’t hide you from their News Feed, all your Page posts will appear exactly where you need them to: in the News Feeds of people who have already shown their appreciation of your company by liking your Page.

Facebook Likes also contribute to the stats on your Facebook Insights page, helping you to better understand and target your audience. So, Although they’re a pretty simple measurement of engagement, Facebook Likes are still the best way of building up an audience that you can then engage with properly further down the line.

Do you think Facebook Likes are still important?

Social Media Tips - 4 Top Tactics For Increasing Contacts and Online Influence

Are you a small business with desires of growing big quickly? Using simple social media tips, techniques and strategies you can do it with relative ease. Here is an example of one of my small business coaching clients who followed some easy to follow practical advice I shared with them:

With a daily advertising budget of less than $5, you can grow your site to:

1. 29,000 members, then to over 46,000 members within a matter of a few months using a combination of Search Engine Optimization (SEO),

2. Starting a LinkedIn group (currently has over 3,000 members)

3. Twitter announcements of leads (2,000 followers and growing),

4. A corporate blog.

Using these simple approaches, anyone can do it. However, it takes persistence on a daily basis. By following these steps you will see your revenue increase matching or exceeding your growth in membership. Not only that, but in the process you will quickly become known in your industry as an invaluable source of leads as well as being incredibly inexpensive.

In addition to these strategies, your business can be as easy as a pure B2B Web 2.0 endeavor in that all of your content is supplied by your members. Lots of your projects may come from issuing agencies and organizations, but the vast majority will come from your members that are participating in your exchange program. This social gathering of content will keep your site fresh and exceptionally active as more and more members join on a daily basis.

If you are out to attract prospective customers and develop your online presence and exposure, you owe it to yourself and the financial future of your business to learn everything you can about social media.



Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3478955

Should Facebook Tell Users Who Has Seen Their Posts?

Last week, an article by Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel started an interesting debate. The question: should Facebook show users how many of their friends see their posts, as well as how many likes and comments these posts get?

Motivated by a Stanford University study entitled “Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks”, which revealed that Facebook users were “reaching 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends over the course of a month”, Warzel opined that it might be beneficial to users if they had access to their posts’ reach stats, just as page manager’s and advertisers do.

He also theorised why Facebook didn’t reveal these stats, based on two passages from the Stanford University study which speculated as to why the 220,000 users involved in the study thought that a lower percentage of their friends were seeing their posts that the actual 61%.

The first passage:

Why do people underestimate their audience size in social media? One possible explanation is that, in order to reduce cognitive dissonance, users may lower their estimates for posts that receive few likes or comments. A necessary consequence of users underestimating their audience is that they must be overestimating the probability that each audience member will choose to like or comment on the post. For these posts without feedback, it might be more comfortable to believe that nobody saw it than to believe that many saw it but nobody liked it.

The second passage:

Some measure of social translucence and plausible deniability seems helpful: audience members might not want to admit they saw each piece of content, and sharers might be disappointed to know that many people saw the post but nobody commented or “Liked”.Warzel reasoned that it is probably in Facebook’s interest to keep reach stats from users, so that they aren’t disappointed by the fact that their friends will often see their posts but won’t engage with them, which might in turn cause them to post on Facebook less.

In the article, however, Warzel did not definitively say whether Facebook should make reach stats available to users or not, instead concluding that Facebook kept the vast majority of statistics hidden from the average user – a fact that Warzel didn’t say outright was a bad thing, but did imply as such with the overall tone of his article.
Thirteen hours ago, Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom posted a response to Warzel’s article on Facebook. He wrote that the main premise of Warzel’s opinion piece – “that everyone wants to know how many friends see each of their posts and Facebook doesn't want to tell them” – is incorrect, revealing that, in fact, Facebook had built and tested a similar feature internally but concluded that there wasn’t any real demand for it:

[People] are way more interested in seeing *who* liked their posts, rather than just the number of people who saw it. In fact, in all of the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive about News Feed each month, virtually no one has asked to see this information.

Backstrom took umbrage at Warzel’s implication that Facebook’s engineers “have lots of ulterior motives when [they] make decisions about News Feed”. In the case of users seeing reach stats, for example, Backstrom said the time it took to implement the feature “isn't worth the space it would take up on the screen”.

TechCrunch’s Josh Constine drew Warzel’s attention to Backstrom’s rebuttal, asking for his opinion viaTwitter. On Twitter, Warzel clarified his position on the main question “should Facebook tell users who has seen their posts?” He argued that users should be able to see how many people have viewed their posts, but not who these people are.




Warzel went on to say that he thinks it strange that Facebook encourages users to connect, but then doesn’t reveal how much users are actually connecting through posts and comments, saying that he finds it “hard to believe [that] those looking to 'share' with 'friends' don't care at all about actually reaching them” asking “why do it then?” A question Constine answered, saying that posting adds “another competitive element” to Facebook and people are actually sharing “for themselves”.

Constine then wrote an article about the conversation himself, determining that Backstrom is probably telling the truth:

[The] missing view counts stems not from some malicious fight to keep users in the dark, but from Facebook’s philosophy of trying to only build things that are useful for a wide audience.

Personally, I agree with Constine and Backstrom, I don’t think that the average user really wants or needs to see their posts’ reach stats. It would benefit me more, in fact, if the engagement stat became available, as I post videos and articles more often than statuses. It would be interesting to see how many people engaged with my embedded content, even if they didn't like or share it themselves, just to see what sort of things my friends were interested in.

In reality, though, I would prefer things to stay as they are, with just likes and comments, as they’re the only two positive options I have ever really needed (I say positive because a ‘disapprove’ button would also come in useful, but would never become a reality).

Do you think Facebook users should be able to see the reach of their posts?