A trend seems to be sweeping Facebook right now – or at least, it is through my notifications. Its basic premise is to encourage you to trade Page invites and while it has an apparent immediate boost, it ultimately carries some long-term problems.
It encourages people to invite friends to Like a Page and then to select to invite all of your friends. Here’s the issue, indiscriminate invites are hugely unlikely to actually yield valuable results – either in the initial period of getting more Likes, but more importantly, to actually bring a demonstrable difference to the Page itself.
Chasing Likes is really just vanity
The problem is, you’re just inviting a whole bunch of people, for no discernible reason – other than they’re connected to you – to jump in on another Page. Now, if there was a relevance to it, then boom, you’re in business – but just asking *all* your friends to get involved is pointless.
And of course, even if some, many or all of your friends were to actually follow your suggestion, and Like the Page – to what end? What is this actually going to achieve? These people have simply followed your suggestion, there’s no connection, nothing to relate to, nothing to hook them – they’re just…there. Are these people going to interact with posts from the Page? No, almost certainly not.
So what you’re going to achieve is a Page that has more Likes, but more people are ultimately unlikely to engage with the content being generated. So the long-term burn is ultimately going to be a penalty – and recovering from this is going to be oh-so-much harder.
Reciprocal relationships are often a bad idea
So you get someone to do it for your Page and you do it for them, and they do it for…
This is essentially just the new Like Ladder. It’s artificially inflating metrics, it is not organic, it is not authentic and thus sits in the black-hat camp.
If you do something for someone else, in exchange for them to do it for you, you are essentially ‘buying’ these Likes, and this is absolutely not a strategy you want to be pursuing.
Look, I get why it’s attractive – we’ve been told for so long, by all sorts of sources that we must get more Likes…invite people, add people, reach people – but they have to be the right people.
Today, I’ve been talking to businesses at the Digital Marketing Futures conference about Measuring Digital Success and it covers exactly this topic.
Build a community of brand advocates
So if you focus your efforts on building people who are going to buy from you, sure – but more so, for people who can champion your brand. Who will engage with your content, share your posts, refer and recommend you – this is where the strength lies.
Quality over quantity is an age-old mantra that many of us bring out at this point, but it’s so very true. This organic approach can absolutely take longer, so you won’t get that instant gratification but it will pay dividends, for sure.
