After my rather unexpected discovery of using 'like' ladders and hikes causing a reduction in the reach of my posts on facebook (see Previous Post - Is a Like Enough? for more details) I have been investigating why on earth this should be the case. I should point out that i am no facebook expert, i have simply spent time looking into how it all works.
On closer inspection i have discovered a few different reasons why this may be the case:
1. All of the people using 'like' ladders and hike pages are businesses. Even though they may actually engage in the 'liking' the way they are supposed to - i.e. by returning 'likes' from a personal profile quite a few business people have a separate fb account they use for options such as liking ladders which do not have any connection to their friends or customers. Many of them on inspection have NO friends associated with their 'liking account'.
This then means that you, if you are using your actual account, are giving these businesses free access to your newsfeed and helping them to gain reach while you are oblivious to the fact that your access to other people is actually halted.
2. Similarly, as business owners themselves many of the people using ladders have discovered how to use the privacy controls on their own newsfeeds to prevent your updates showing in their newsfeeds. Again, as above if you are not doing this the balance is completely in their favour.
3. When your newsfeed is taken up with lots of business updates that your friends are simply not interested in they get fed up looking at it and don't access it anymore. As far as i can tell the reach statistic is affected by the number of people actually engaging with a newsfeed in some way - commenting, liking etc. if they stop looking then the level of interaction will go down!
4. Although people may join in with the 'like ladders' at the time they may clear these likes again just afterwards - if you have ever watched your like number go down this is probably the reason - it is NOT a fb glitch. This is perhaps one of the main reasons for your reach to suddenly drop - if people remove the 'like' from your page you will see a drastic reduction in your reach statistics because they have just removed your access to however many friends they have.
5. The final reason i have discovered for this drop in activity is because people, once again getting fed up with all the status updates of business pages find out that they can hide pages updates. Here is a quote from a business strategy page i came across in my investigations: "When you network a lot for your business you can often end up with a newsfeed full of posts by pages and your friends get missed. This usually leads to people hiding the pages and pages not being seen - in effect making tagging lists/ladders/marches pointless".
My conclusion therefore has to be one of questioning this so called 'networking' and asking myself is all that time spent on doing something productive for my business or was the time investigating it time better spent?
On closer inspection i have discovered a few different reasons why this may be the case:
1. All of the people using 'like' ladders and hike pages are businesses. Even though they may actually engage in the 'liking' the way they are supposed to - i.e. by returning 'likes' from a personal profile quite a few business people have a separate fb account they use for options such as liking ladders which do not have any connection to their friends or customers. Many of them on inspection have NO friends associated with their 'liking account'.
This then means that you, if you are using your actual account, are giving these businesses free access to your newsfeed and helping them to gain reach while you are oblivious to the fact that your access to other people is actually halted.
2. Similarly, as business owners themselves many of the people using ladders have discovered how to use the privacy controls on their own newsfeeds to prevent your updates showing in their newsfeeds. Again, as above if you are not doing this the balance is completely in their favour.
3. When your newsfeed is taken up with lots of business updates that your friends are simply not interested in they get fed up looking at it and don't access it anymore. As far as i can tell the reach statistic is affected by the number of people actually engaging with a newsfeed in some way - commenting, liking etc. if they stop looking then the level of interaction will go down!
4. Although people may join in with the 'like ladders' at the time they may clear these likes again just afterwards - if you have ever watched your like number go down this is probably the reason - it is NOT a fb glitch. This is perhaps one of the main reasons for your reach to suddenly drop - if people remove the 'like' from your page you will see a drastic reduction in your reach statistics because they have just removed your access to however many friends they have.
5. The final reason i have discovered for this drop in activity is because people, once again getting fed up with all the status updates of business pages find out that they can hide pages updates. Here is a quote from a business strategy page i came across in my investigations: "When you network a lot for your business you can often end up with a newsfeed full of posts by pages and your friends get missed. This usually leads to people hiding the pages and pages not being seen - in effect making tagging lists/ladders/marches pointless".
My conclusion therefore has to be one of questioning this so called 'networking' and asking myself is all that time spent on doing something productive for my business or was the time investigating it time better spent?
Now you have a better understanding of what is going on you can take appropriate action to ACTUALLY grow your business rather than waste precious time on these activities. Next time i will look at some of the positive steps you can take to achieve your business goals!
As always comments are very welcome - using the comment box below will mean they do not get lost and i can respond to them.
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absolutely brilliant research Eillie :) I am totally fed up with hiking and just decided this weekend that enough was enough ! When a friend of mine told me how fed up she was of seeing my business page and its activities on her newsfeed I was a bit shocked !! I dont think the amount of time spent on hiking the likes is worth it. Yes you may see a slight increase in sales but this is only going to continue if you continue to hike ! It takes up far too much time. But the other interesting point I discovered was (and this wasnt with Hike Those Likes Ireland) but with other organisations doing something similar , that if you didnt participate in the 'liking' on a very regular basis (who has the time??) well there was a sort of feeling of being 'ignored' in other words if you were'nt joining in then your page would be ignored.....my other reason of course for not hiking anymore is that DIVORCE was looming......
ReplyDeleteThanks Mary :) I was quite shocked when i realised what was going on - thankfully i haven't spent too much time on these pages and i certainly won't be spending any more time on them! I know you are not the only one who is fed up with hiking likes and and hopefully once the DIVORCE is sorted you will have some time to network in a much more productive way :) xxx
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