Why run a ‘Like, Follow and Share’ competition on Facebook? Is there any value to Facebook page likes and followers anymore?
On average, Facebook posts from your page will only reach 10% of the users who follow or like your page – with poor Social Media Management, you would be lucky to reach 2% to 5%. In comparison, studies show that the retail industry see an average opening rate of 23% on their email marketing campaigns – and many InSynch clients across the finance, food & beverage and hospitality industries see an opening rate of 40%, or even 50%.
The goal for most businesses is to use Social Media to boost sales through their website. However, we also know that the Facebook algorithm wants content, not outbound links. They call it Social Media for a reason. I recently lead a consultation with a company who had over 100,000 likes on Facebook, but due to a bad strategy were only reaching a handful of people with each post.
Why have 1200 page likes or followers if 120 of those on average are seeing an image or video that they cannot purchase your product from? Of course, you can tag products using Commerce Manager – but what if you are trying to generate leads, sell rooms in your hotel or bookings at your restaurant? What you need is website visits.
At InSynch, our database of business emails goes back over a decade. We own that database, and we can use it on any platform we like. The same cannot be said for Facebook – Facebook own your customer data. Is that good business sense? To only be able to contact your past, current or potential customers using a platform you have no control over? This is why I wouldn’t advise running a ‘Like, Follow and Share’ competition.
Organic Social Media is, predominantly, a brand awareness & customer loyalty tool. If you want to sell your product or service, try running a competition on Social Media that encourages email sign-ups. Why? Because you will receive more website visits from an email, a larger quantity of customers will see your email and information, and you will own those email addresses forever. Doesn’t that make more sense for your Digital Marketing Strategy?
If you are reading this and thinking “What are the Facebook competition rules?”, you may be shocked to learn that under the Facebook competition rules updated in 2020, Facebook state that you must not ‘incentivise people to use social plugins or to like a Page’ in exchange for competition entry, it is also against the rules to run a promotion on the basis of tagging a friend in a post to enter. The Facebook competition rules also state that asking for competition entries by sharing a post to your timeline is also not permitted. Doing so could leave you locked out of your Facebook Ads Manager or see your company page and all of its followers deleted.