As a brand, the main vanity metrics in Social Media especially in Facebook were your Facebook Page Likes. But that is until recently, they’ve implemented a few new things to shift the norm for social media engagement; Facebook Followers.
Facebook is updating page layouts and management options for Public Figure pages in order to make it easier to find insights into their audience. They are also looking to find how they can better show creator relevancy through Facebook Followers versus Likes.
In this blog, we discuss why Facebook Followers are becoming the new social media currency and how this can impact how people engage on Facebook and social media.
Followers are a Strong Indicator of Relevance
When checking out brands on social media we can’t deny that we tend to trust it more when it has a lot of Facebook Likes, however nowadays there’s a higher chance of trusting a page more when there it has a lot of followers.
A page like won’t take you as far as followers can. The reason behind this is because a lot of Likes doesn’t necessarily mean better, and furthermore – their posts may not show up in the Liker’s News Feed regularly.
On the other side, Followers get alerts about any new content or updates on the page, making the follow option more desirable for business pages. This also means more engagement for your business.
The Future May Be Less About “Likes” and More About Conversation
In 2019 Instagram experimented on getting rid of the popularity element of posting by hiding its likes count. Facebook has tested this as well but has kept Likes so far and instead shifted to promoting Following without totally getting rid of Likes.
Social Media platforms including Twitter have found that conversation and engagement are the future for social media and may be more important than looking at likes on a post or page.
So, the idea of removing Likes is to encourage more people to comment, share their thoughts, and connect with others on a deeper level within the platform.
Conclusion
Should you be worried? Just like Google Core Web Vitals update, this new emphasis on followers by Facebook all depends on the quality of your page and its content. Like I said, the idea of followers is to encourage more people to engage with you and your page.
What you need is to ensure your current followers remain engaged and interested on your page whatever its purpose is. The rest will follow because when people start engaging and interacting proactively with your page not only will it help you have free traffic on Facebook it’ll also help build your page’s relevance as well.
The key is to get creative with your content, and to ensure you’re targeting the right people when running ads. Now if you’re doing this you have nothing to worry about.
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