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How Important Are Facebook Page Likes?

In the online world, being liked is an indicator of success. You have a page, people like it, you're successful. Or you make a post, people like it, you're successful. Right?

Posted on 8/30/2016 by Wendy Hensley, Marketing Manager

With recent updates by Facebook to their newsfeed algorithm and the decrease of business page content showing up in users' newsfeeds, it's harder than ever to get your content out to your users and use those likes as an indicator of success or failure.

When the like button was introduced in 2009, it was the tool Facebook used to determine what users wanted to see more of in their newsfeed. Remember when you simply had to increase your likes to get more engagement? Facebook took the data from the likes and then showed users relevant information based on what they liked. For example, if a user liked pages about horses, they would see more horse content in their newsfeed.

This information was particularly valuable to advertisers. After all, targeting users that speak about certain topics or interact with other pages on a topic could mean an increase in conversion.

As the social platform became more cluttered with additional users and businesses all clamoring for those interactions, the likes started to lose their impact. According to Facebook, a user could see as much as 1500 updates in a day based on their business and friend likes. That’s a lot of content that no one can actually consume in a 24-hour period.

In addition, in 2013 Facebook added an "unfollow" option. This further impacted the value of the like because users could like a page and still not see any of their content if they unfollowed them.

Because of this, likes should really only be one indicator of your social success. It's more important to check your followers. If your likes go up or remain the same but your followers go down, then your content is most likely not hitting your target audience.

So, although it's important to use your likes as a way to gain followers, using likes as the only indicator of your online marketing success won't give you the results you're looking for. Instead focus on your followers and engagements to measure that success.

It's a good idea to boost your posts. Do you have a social media ad strategy? If not, we can help. Our staff of social media experts can help build a robust program that will help you engage with your followers. For more information check out our social media services.

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