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3 ways to ruin your Facebook Business Page Engagement!

by | Social Media

So, I did most of my digital marketing education at the University of Google.  Which was great, because let’s face it what you learn today, is out of date tomorrow. I followed all the trending ways of growing my audience on facebook and then the algorithms changed. Watch my video to learn about the  mistakes I made and what  you can do instead.

Hello Facebook, I hope you have had a truly wonderful day.  It has been a while since I have done a live video, I have been procrastinating and really just not showing up and I am really sorry, I am back in the game and ready to go.  So today I am talking about 3 ways that you and I have done to completely ruin your facebook page engagement.

All of them were done with the intention of improving my business and my page.

They were strategies being promotedd by guru’s and other successful business owners that were further along in their business.  They were all telling me that these growth strategies were fine and going to get me better results than I was currently getting.

The process was simple:

  • increase your page likes
  • increase your posting
  • your content will get in front of your audience.

It is not the case, so I have done all of these and I am going to give you suggestions on how to get yourself back if you done them yourself and and practical strategies to rectify these specific steps.

So 1 of the first one’s it was really big approx 2 years ago now,  I know they still happen I’ve just got the blinkers on and I don’t see them happening around me.

Facebook/Instagram Like Ladders

Like ladders are something where you might be part of a facebook group, networking group or bloggers group and they will post a  “comment below your Facebook page, visit 10 of them and like them, everyone will do the same and that way everyone gets new likers to their page.”

On instagram they are often called “engagement threads” and the process is still much the same.  Like or engage on other peoples content, follow the account and others will do the same for you!

That’s great the numbers on the side of your page are going to go up and your post engagement is going to take a skydive.

That’s because Facebook’s algorithm shows your content to a certain number of people.

For example, let’s work with 100 people, let’s say you’ve got 100 likes on your business page, 50 of them are people that genuinely like your content, genuinely want to see you stuff and interact with it regularly and the other 50% you’ve got from these like ladders.

So, you post a post and Facebook shows it to 10 of the people who joined you from a like ladder and no one interacts with it. Facebook doesn’t bother showing it to the other people who like your page, because those first 10 people have told Facebook that it is not relevant.

Don’t be disheartened, it works in reverse too!

If you only have 50 people that like your page and they are all excited to see your content,  Facebook will show it to 10 of those people they will all interact with it, comment, share, and then it will be shown to more people.

Because it’s a piece of content people are enjoying, people are engaging with, people are liking.

Best Posts for Facebook

Remember there are 3 types of content that get people –

  • entertaining
  • educational
  • inspiring

that’s the type of content you need to be putting out there for your business.

Now, I grew my page to probably 600 likes before I realised that this strategy was just shit.

Recovery: so how do you get back from that?  The short answer, it’s difficult!  Here is what I did.

1. Pay to boost your post to your ideal audience now. This means that you actually know them intimately and you can tell Facebook who they are, the clearer you are at this step, the easier and cheaper it will be for you.

If you’re not quite aware of who your target market is or you don’t want to invest in ads then you can do what I did.

2. I went back through the people that like my page basically one by one and looked at their profile for a few key things…

  1. if they didn’t fit the criteria of my ideal audience
  2. I didn’t recognise their name from interacting with my post
  3. Or were from a country I didn’t ship to.

And I literally deleted them, I lost around 100 likes which hurt my ego a lot.  I then worked on growing my pages through more organic methods and connecting with customers after a purchase rather than chasing them before.

Mostly I started interacting in groups,  I don’t actually ask anyone to like my pages anymore, I simply build a relationship. If you find me and you find my content and there’s a link and you go and click on it and you like my page that is sooo awesome, I appreciate you, I love you.

 

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But I’m not going to beg for it, I’m not going to trade it, I’m not going to sell it, because that audience is is worth so much more to me and my business that I don’t want to taint it with people that don’t want to be there.

Invite All that Like the Post

Another strategy is to invite all, which is a really cool plugin and I’m pretty sure you can just do it natively from the Facebook page.  If you click on one of your posts where it says if you go to a page with one of your posts is on your page and you click on the section where it says liked by I’ll Hearted by or loved by it’ll bring up a list of people that liked that post or reacted to it that’s. I reacted to that post you can then click a button next to their name and invite them to like your page.

Which again will build up your numbers in just the same way as a like ladder.  You see, they might have liked THAT post but they might not like your stuff constantly.  If you really want to make the most of these people and you are a small authentic brand, you might send them a message, I wouldn’t send too many of these in a day Facebook will block you from interacting with comments and pm’s because they’re an unsolicited message, almost considered spam.

So, you could send them a message and say “hi, how you going? Thanks for liking such and such a post, here’s what I generally talk about on my page. If you’re interested in that, I would love it if you’d like to come across and like it that that would be great.”

For example, I could say  “Hey Sally, Hope you’re having a fabulous day! Thank you so much for liking my posts about Facebook Page engagement and how not to ruin it. I’m a business coach & Digital Marketing Mentor, I help entrepreneurs grow their business through digital marketing methods, if that’s something of interest to you, you might find my page helpful. Thanks so much have a nice day. Joy”

 THEN…
Walk away, you don’t send them another message, you don’t beg, you don’t do anything. I wouldn’t want to be sending any more than about 5 of those a day though, so it’s going to be a long time before you build up a huge audience, however if you do it like that you will get sales quicker.
Because…
You have built up authority, you showed that you are a real person, and you filter an engaged audience on your page.

Paid Facebook Ads to Foreign Countries

 

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Yes, that is how I feel about it now but…
Last but not least, there was a strategy I was told about, where it was really cheap to get page views from foreign countries.
I have no idea why I thought this was a great idea but at the time I did.
It was promoting one of my viral style sites, I have a small portfolio of websites.   I was told I could get page likes for $0.001 and I got them for $0.004, those promises: at least half of them are not true.
But I boosted this post to places like India, China and Africa, countries that are really, really, cheap to get leads and likes from.  I got the interaction, I got a ton of extra likes for my page, and they are meaningless.
It almost doesn’t matter what I try and monetize that site with for that audience, I can’t do it. I do monetize that site through other methods and it’s really successful considering the crappy start that I gave it, but that audience is hard to monetize. They don’t purchase from amazon.com, if you’re an affiliate marketer, they’re not likely to purchase your high-end coaching program if you’re a coach, they’re not likely to purchase your blogging course if you do that, and  they’re not likely to purchase expensive web design.  They are cheap because they are hard to monetize.  It’s one of those things if you can feed money into it, then you need to be able to get a return. So instead of advertising to the cheap countries and getting cheap clicks at $0.001.
I would rather pay $6.45 for leads  I can do something with and you need to focus on that too. So if you’ve got a really limited marketing budget and you want to do Facebook ads it doesn’t matter if it is a $5 boosted post, or if it’s $50 weekly campaign that is on going.
Spend it on the people that are going to spend with you.
Don’t target Americans, if you only work in Australia.
Don’t target Australia, if you’re only sell to America.
It is really straight forward target the people that are your target audience. If you get other people along the way, that’s awesome and they can be interested in your brand and you can sell to them, great but if you’re going to spend money on advertising spend on advertising to people that want what you sell.
As you can see, I have recovered but it took some time. I would love to hear in the comments your tips for successful facebook growth, or the mistakes you have made along the way.  
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