If you have a Facebook brand page, you are likely guilty of liking your own page. Why? You know what you post, and as an admin you can enable notifications for any activity, so go unlike your brand page.
Why does it matter if you like your own page?
Unfortunately, math takes all the blame. Regardless of the number of Like’s and activity your brand page receives, not all of your fans are shown the same information. Facebook uses a sophisticated algorithm to determine who sees your content and by being one of the most active on your own page, you are taking up one of those valuable spaces.
Mark Cuban (NBA owner, Shark, all-around-money-man) wrote an article on the Huffington Post about what he really thinks about Facebook. In it he calls out Facebook’s money-grabbing techniques on brand pages that have spend endless amounts of time gathering fans in the form of Likes, but charging an arm and a leg to reach them all.
No matter how engaging your content is, not everyone will see it.
So what does this have to do with liking your own page?
As a fan of your own page, you likely visit and interact with the page more than most fans. That means you are more likely to see your own content because of your high level of interactivity.
So what, you see your own content in place of an actual fan. Big deal.
Then add in all of the administrators that also like the page. The developers that need access to the page. The advertising accounts that need to see insights. The agency employees that are testing posts and applications. Brand pages that have hundreds of thousands of likes will have lots of people touching and interacting with the page, and each one of those people that likes your page will take away from real fans seeing and engaging with your content.
So go unlike your page and tell your employees, developers, administrators and others to do the same. Brand pages are not about the number of likes, but about the engagement with the content. Let more customers and real fans see the content rather than yourself after you’ve posted it.
Michelle January 4th, 2013 at 4:19 pm
Valid points (I’m not happy with what’s been happening with Facebook reach at all), but I’m not sure this is necessarily the case when people related to the brand like the page.
I think about it this way: we’re also more likely to like/share the stuff that’s being posted, cause we’re proud of it. Because of that, say you have 20 people who are tied to the brand that get to see the content. I’d take an educated guess that those 20 people are going to engage more than 20 non-related people. When you have a higher % of people engaging with the content, they serve it to more people. That’s how you grow your reach.
Carson Shold January 4th, 2013 at 4:24 pm | Twitter: @cshold
Thanks for the comment, Michelle.
That was definitely an oversight by me. If you are liking and sharing the content generated by your brand page, by all means continue doing so as that will expand the reach more than unliking your page.
I have two developer accounts that like a large number of pages each. With no valuable friends to share content with, they are definitely on the list of people who should still unlike the pages.
Ben January 7th, 2013 at 4:47 pm
Am I allowed to Like this page?