Why you need to stop asking people to invite their friend list to like your page...

stop

(Sorry not sorry)

Sometime towards the end of 2019, someone clicked on about a new Facebook feature and it seems like our newsfeeds were flooded overnight...

'INVITE ALL YOUR FRIENDS TO LIKE MY BUSINESS PAGE! JUST GO TO THE 'COMMUNITY' TAB, TAP 'INVITE' AND THEN YOU CAN SELECT ALL OF THEM!!!!'

I get it, this sounds like a dead easy way to get those numbers up - we all know how hard it's gotten to build your following on Facebook.

But let's look at it in a bit more detail with our sceptical-goggles on...


Option 1 - They piss off their friends, who don't like your page

I've actually stopped declining page invites, I've just had a look to try and count how many I've got... I got bored at 49 and my scroll bar was about a quarter of the way down, meaning there are literally hundreds! 

I had a little spy at the pages my friends were inviting me to like. Some of them didn't have their business address on (one was a cake delivery place who shared a front and back photo of their menu and that didn't even have the address on! Say it with me Bosses, MAKE - IT - EASY!)

One of the pages was a phone repair shop in Wakefield (about 100 miles away from me)

One was a masonry contractor in MALTA!

One was a fresh dog treat company in the US of A (I have a cat and live in Newcastle, England)


Think about the business you're asking them to promote. The chances are you're mobile, home or salon based so you only really want to be speaking to people within a certain distance to where you work. Do you predominantly serve women? Between a certain age range? Do your clients tend to have hair? So many questions! 

Then, think about who's on their friends list... do you want their Uncle Geoff from Swansea who's bald and lives 200 miles away, to like your page?

True story, my friend Nina had this happen to her... and ended up with her old pal Tinna, an old punk rocker, commenting along to her live video (super distracting!), and her bf's pals commenting on her pics, asking her him, 'is this your lass??' - Not ideal! (Also thanks Nina for letting me share your cringe stories! Absolute babe)


Option 2 - Okay, let's say that every single one of their 1,000 Facebook friends liked your page

A bit like Nina's example above. Out of their 1.000 friends, let's say 500 of them are people who go to the barbers and you don't to barbering. Out of the 500 who have long hair, 300 of them live in other parts of the country, 100 of them are in their 70s and sadly you're not smashing out wet sets and perms all day. That leaves 100 people out of 1,000 that might be potential clients.

But what does Facebook do, it shows your posts to 1-3% of your followers. So you're reaching up to 300 of those 1,000 new followers). Are you reaching Uncle Geoff, cousins who moved to Oz, Granny Enid? Are those people gonna engage? Either no, because your posts are irrelevant to them, or yes, and you've got a Tinna situation on your hands.

What does Facebook do if your posts get crap engagement? They pull it back even more so your next posts will reach even less people - not good!


Option 3 - They piss off some people, and you get a load of randoms following your page

I think you get the picture here!


So what do you do instead? Well, Facebook loves meaningful engagement. Don't try to 'hack the algorithm', play fair and focus on making content that entertains, informs and gives value to your followers. 

It's so much better for you to have less followers, but they are engaged and love what you do, than having tens of thousands of followers and only get a handful of likes on each post (and don't even get me started on bulk buying followers!)

The more you create better content, the more engagement it gets, then it ends up on the newsfeed of your followers' friends. Then they can decide if yours is the kinda page they want to follow and will be much more likely to build a relationship with you and your brand than by being blasted with 485768447 page like requests from an old colleague from 18 years ago.

Hope this helps, Bosses!

Maddi x


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