I read an article today by the co-founder of a social media software marketing company which caught my attention pretty quickly. He stated in his article that “you should stop monitoring how big your Facebook and Twitter fan clubs are and start focusing on the results they bring instead”.
Well he was right and wrong at the same time. It is important that you actually measure the conversion rates of those fans or followers. For example Twitter users just think, “let me click as many people as possible to follow, hope they will follow me and maybe, just maybe, I will get someone who is interested in what I have to offer”.
And of course it doesn’t help if your Facebook “likes” are all generated by your friends and family too. Or does it matter?
You see where most people are missing the boat and especially the author of the referenced article, in my opinion, is that it DOES matter how many LIKES you have on Facebook.
Why? Well consider the impact of the recent teaming up of Facebook and Bing and sharing of information. What happens when you search for a hotel in Maui using Bing? Well I get my usual 10 or so results back, however below each search result will be Facebook data. That Facebook data, will show if any of my friends liked any of those search results’ websites or Pages. So if I see 2 of my friends have “liked” a particular hotel, called Maui Hotel for example, chances are I will go to their website first, given my friends previous “likes”. So my friends are starting to influence search results.
This type of data is only going to grow over the years too, as search engines try predict what the best search results would be for you, using data such as Facebook input.
What is more, is that they will also place all Facebook data for Pages that your friends haven’t liked. So again, a search result with 1,000 “likes” will almost certainly attract more clicks than the one with only 10 “likes” below it page link.
The significance of generating plenty of “likes” is significant. You only have to look at many large corporation with large budgets, asking followers to go and “like” their Facebook pages. They get it. Small businesses need to be especially aware of this development. Quantity and Quality is important.
