Despite the fact that Facebook is continually adjusting their algorithm to provide less organic reach to Business Pages, it is still incredibly important to build a following and gain more likes.
Facebook Page likes are not just about “perception”. The general thinking is that the more Facebook Page Likes you have (followers essentially) the better your brand or company is doing. And while that might be the case there is so much more strategy and reason to building a Facebook audience.
Before I continue, I will say that even though Facebook’s even most recent (2018) algorithm changes started limiting Business Pages organic reach (Free Impressions), if you are posting relevant content to your audience you will still reach many people. For example, last night at about 6:00 PM I posted an image promoting my brand on one of my pages and within 3-4 hours it had over 200 shares, 300 likes, and reached well over 7,000 of my audience. And this was completely for free. A content calendar and engaging content is still critical on Facebook.
You have to start thinking of building a Facebook audience in another way as well. And that’s that your audience should be considered warm leads and an audience that you can run ads against at a very low cost and will be very effective. The quality of your followers should be valued more than the amount of follows you have. But, the higher number of high quality followers you have will lead to more conversions (sales).
You can run a Facebook ad directly to ONLY the people who follow your brand on Facebook, and if they are highly engaged followers you will see much more affordable results.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s the proof.
I launched a very minimal budget ad for one of my companies (budget of only $34) ONLY targeting those that “liked” my Facebook page and were already engaged with the brand. Because the content was so relevant to them, it was costing me $0.22 cents per click! That is right, 2 cents a click. Where else could you get 22 cents per click? Of those 4 clicks, 2 converted (the ad has only been running for 1 day) and my Return On Investment was 3,000%.
Now of course it took some time to build the Facebook Audience (page likes), but the ability to target an audience that is such low hanging fruit makes almost every campaign successful.
My recommendation is that after you have built a large following on Facebook, whenever you launch a campaign you should run at least 50% of your budget to ONLY those who are already liking your page and engaging with the content.
Side note, if a Facebook user engages with a Facebook Advertisement you are running, this will also increase how much organic content (the free stuff) you post without dollars behind it. It’s win/win.