By Mike
Facebook Marketing is broken at the very core. It’s broken because for whatever reason, your focus is wrong. I’d say at least 90% of Facebook Page owners have one of the following as their #1 goal: get more likes, or convert likes into sales. You may have pressure from your boss to get more likes and make more sales. You may be a traditional marketing professional who’s been accustomed to measuring ROI of your campaigns. The problem is that social media is different. It’s not the initial like or the sales conversion that’s important—but instead everything that lies in the middle. More likes and more sales come as a result of solid execution of the ‘stuff’ in the middle.
Focusing on Likes is WRONG (and guilting people into liking your page [as seen above] is even worse)
Think about this in a real-world example. You own a restaurant. You have 9 employees working inside the restaurant, doing everything from waiting tables to cooking and cleaning. You also have 1 poor teenager outside spinning a sign, trying to bring people into your restaurant. This is pretty standard for most restaurants I’ve seen.
But what if the numbers were reversed?
What if you had 9 employees spinning signs outside to attract more customers and just 1 person inside actually taking care of the customers? It would be an absolute mess. The sad part is, lots of Facebook Page owners are doing the equivalent of this. They devout almost all their attention to gaining likes and forget about providing value to their fans after they click the like button– not good to say the least.
Focusing on Sales is also WRONG
Facebook is like a party. People go to Facebook to catch up with friends, see pictures from the party they missed last night, etc. People don’t come to Facebook to make purchases. So if you’re investing time and money into selling on your Facebook page, it’s probably not worth it– almost no one goes to your page (forget about them getting to an app on your page).
Introducing After-Like Marketing
Here’s a new vocabulary word for social media marketers: After-Like Marketing. All the stuff that falls in between the initial ‘like’ and the conversion [which may be a sale, a user, etc] is encompassed in this new term. Embrace it—this should be your new focus. We’re helping page owners with this, and we want to help you– so request an invite to PostRocket if you’re interested in learning more! After-Like Marketing is centered around the following question: “What value can I provide for my fans after they like my page?”
Please, please, please don’t be foolish enough to believe that the only answer to this question is discounts. Yes—discounts are good. Yes—discounts are something that fans want. But you can’t build an engaged community simply around discounts. They are just a small part of the solution, not a solution in itself.
So what can you do?
Here’s a short list of some things that I would put into the ‘After-Like Marketing’ Bucket:
- Provide valuable content– the right stuff, at the right time, in the right amount, to the right people.
- Be there to answer questions/resolve issues. Great example from MightyText below.
MightyText Responds to User – Example
- Show fans they matter—ask them what they think, make changes based on feedback, and highlight these as Starbucks (pictured below) has.
Starbucks makes changes based on feedback.
- Feature fan stories/photos/reviews/etc. Dunkin Donuts (pictured below) and many others do this regularly.
Dunkin Donuts Features a Fan of the Week
It all gets back to building a community on your Facebook Page and providing value to your fans—that’s what after-like marketing really is. Remember that your ‘like count’ doesn’t matter– so don’t try to gain likes from people who don’t actually like your page. In fact, when it comes to EdgeRank, bad fans hurt you more than they help, because they aren’t likely to ever engage with your page– which makes your posts seem less compelling to Facebook’s algorithms. This results in Facebook showing your posts to a lower percentage of people.
What else would you consider After-Like Marketing? Let me know in the comments and don’t forget to share/tweet/like/etc 
