With more than 750 million active users and a page rank higher than Google gives itself, Facebook has become the marketing tool for the digital age. Yet while getting your business page online and active is easy, attaining the elusive ‘likes’ is not – and retaining them can be even harder. Here are five common mistakes that will lose you your ‘likes’ and some tips on how to prevent making them.
1. Talking About Yourself Too Much
Facebook is above all a tool for communicating. This means that as a business, you must use Facebook to interact with your customers.
This can entail posting tips, articles or information of value, offering discounts or competitions or simply taking the time to respond to the comments (whether good or bad) that your customers make.
While it’s fine to post the odd message about a great new product, if that’s all you do, no one will listen.
2. Posting Too Often
This is a fatal mistake made by both commercial and personal Facebook users.
People don’t want their news-stream flooded with messages from the same person or company so if they see you popping up a little too often, it won’t be long before they’re hitting the ‘unlike’ button.
Once or twice a day is fine, so long as you are posting something of value. However if you’ve nothing useful to say, it’s probably best to say nothing at all.
3. Focusing on Gaining Likes, Rather Than Keeping Them
A very common way for companies to increase the number of ‘likes’ they have on Facebook is to run a competition. While this is a very effective method of increasing your Facebook fans, if you don’t engage those people whilst they are ‘liking’ you, once the competition ends you will promptly be ‘unliked’.
In order to avoid this, you need to quickly convince them that you are worth a presence on their news-feed. As well as posting information of value, try posting witty and interesting material while giving them a specific reason to remain amongst your likes.
If you’ve run a competition, don’t end it quietly. Offer a consolation prize to those who didn’t win such as a discount code, and be sure to mention that they should stay a fan so they will be informed when your next competition begins.
4. Overdoing a Subject
If the material you post is consistently of the same breed, people will become bored and either stop ‘liking’ you or cease paying attention to anything your company posts.
Instead – make sure to mix it up. Try posting something interesting, something informative, something funny then something strange.
And don’t think you always need to stay directly within the topic of your field. If you sell women’s clothing, you don’t need to speak exclusively about fashion. Think about what else your target demographic would be interested in.
Which celebrities are they likely to follow? Are they going to be concerned about their image, their career or their children? Are they more likely to be saving money or splurging on a luxury holiday?
5. Neglecting Your Campaign
As easy as it is to post too often, it’s just as easy to post too little. While social media is usually only a small element of most companies day-to-day activities, in order to make a success of the campaign, time must be set aside each day to work on it.
The good thing is that it doesn’t take long to keep on top of a social media campaign, particularly when you’re just starting out. However if things start taking off and you become really popular you might find that keeping up with your customers comments takes up too much of the day.
At this point it may be worth dedicating a member of staff to running the campaign or employing a specialist social media agency to carry out the work for you.
