I was once out on a business event invited by one of my friends. I was introduced to a friend who was a comic artist. He published his comics on his Facebook page. He needed exposure and went around asking everyone to like his page.
I told him honestly: you’re not going to get anywhere with that strategy. That’s because it’s not targeted. Even if I did like your page, I don’t care about comics, hence my friends probably don’t care about it.
I’ll never share your content, so won’t my friends.
This is why, getting your friends to like your page is a vanity metric.
Just another day, I had a friend who told me he ran a paid likes campaign to get cheap likes. Yes, you can invite your whole friends list to get ‘social proof’. However, then again, when people click on your page, they don’t see any form of engagement.
Secondly, it is easy to purchase fake Facebook likes. You can analyze someone's Facebook page likes here. If someone’s Facebook page barely gets commented on or likes, then you’ll know that it’s somewhat a fake page.
Knowing Your Audience
It’s common for entrepreneurs, real estate agents and financial planners to share their products and services on their Facebook wall, in an attempt to sell to their friends.
Is this the right strategy to go about it?
I personally refuse to spam on my Facebook wall. I don’t care. I don’t want my Facebook audience to be reading my blog. I don’t want my friends to be reading about my SEO services. They don’t really care anyway. In fact, I don’t even want my friends to be my customers.
You remember that Jack Ma quote? He said 'when selling to close friends and family, no matter how much you're selling to them, they will always feel you're earning their money, no matter how cheap you sell to them, they still wouldn't appreciate it.'
This is why I got into search engine optimization consulting in the first place: so I didn’t need to sell to friends.
Whenever you share something on a platform, you gotta ask yourself: who is the audience behind that platform?
Your friends on Facebook care about different things. They don’t really care about SEO or digital marketing. In fact, mostly no one wants to like a page dishing boring SEO advice such as: on page SEO and link building.
Even if you shared my articles or my services on my Facebook page, what is the likelihood of acquiring a customer?
When you come from an audience mindset, all these short term and popular marketing strategies go out of the window. You’ll also stop worrying about pissing off all your friends by getting them to like your Facebook page.
Real Metrics Versus Vanity Facebook Metrics
Stop paying attention to vanity metrics and start paying attention to what matters. Things that drive the bottom-line revenue in your business.
- Cost Per Customer Acquisition
Fundamentally, cost per acquisition is the cost of acquiring one paying customer. Whilst it’s easy to get distracted by other data points such as: clicks, conversions, likes or shares, the simplest metric to use it to measure how much you’re paying to get one customer.
If you’re selling a $30 product, your cost per acquisition needs to be less than $30. If you’re spending $500 on local SEO services, Facebook advertising, or whatever marketing platforms you decide to embark on, you need at least 10 customers to justify your cost.
Cost per acquisition measures the amount you’re spending to get a sale or a purchase.
If you’re paying $100 per lead, and you need 5 leads to make a purchase, your cost per acquisition is $500.
- Cost Per Lead:
If you’re paying $20 per click, and for every 5 clicks you get, you get an opt in, or an enquiry, your cost per lead is $100.
$20 X 5 clicks = $100
- Return on Investment
How to measure your return on investment is taking your average value order divided by your cost per acquisition.
ROI = average value order/ cost per acquisition
They are all better metrics to measure and look at when it comes to social media advertising.
