Like exchanges get the thumb down from me
Whenever I am on a social networking site, be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – or even things like forums and message boards, one of the things I see happening A LOT is people with Facebook pages trying to do something called a ‘like exchange’.
In other words, you like someone else’s page and they like yours in return.
My advice is in almost all cases, DON’T DO IT!
The one and only time I would recommend a like exchange is to get your first 25 fans. If you already have a fan page, and are setting up a new one, you need 25 fans to get what’s called a vanity URL. In other words, the URL to your page will be something like facebook.com/mediyeah rather than facebook.com/pages/17898170918080/mediyeah/898798798.
And you do want a vanity URL because it is cleaner, tidier and easier to work with. You can use it in your other marketing – so on leaflets and things like that.
How to get a vanity URL: Click HERE for my video tutorial
There is only one other time I might suggest a like exchange. When you are a local business, and networking with other local businesses. Promoting each other via Facebook is a great way to build all of your businesses and benefit each other. But that is I guess a bit different to the online random like exchanges I am seeing a lot of.
Apart from those, I would almost never recommend to do a like exchange. It does A LOT more harm to your page than it does good. The reason is that these people sign up to your page and you sign up to theirs purely as a number. A statistic. Nothing else.
They probably aren’t interested in what you have to say, what you are selling or promoting or you or your business in general. They just want the like on their page. And to be fair, you probably have the same feeling about them. Right?
So why is it more harmful than beneficial?
Quality over quantity of fans
The reason is simple – the real objective to be successful on Facebook is to ENGAGE fans. Build a relationship, so they buy from you and become repeat customers. And spread the word about you and your business and refer you more customers.
In a nutshell, that is what Facebook is all about for businesses.
The harmful part is that if you only have a small percentage of your fans interacting on your page, Facebook gives you very little trust or authority in its Edgerank system.
Edgerank is the calculation Facebook does to decide what should and shouldn’t show up in your new feed.
So if your Facebook page has a lot of fans – especially from like exchanges and those ‘fans’ basically aren’t interacting with you, then your page gets low authority and your status updates and posts will not get through to your REAL fans. And that is why it’s really harmful. You need that meaningful connection.
100 fans on your page, of which maybe 20 are interactive will set you up a lot better than 500 of which 20 are interactive.
There is A LOT to getting Facebook fans, engaging with them and making sales. And a lot more than I can cover in one blog post.
But what I really really want you to take away from this is that it is ALL about quality fans over quantity.