10 Reasons why people like a Facebook Page

by deep on July 11th, 2011 2

Recently, economist ran an article called “Starwood’s storytelling contest and the lure of Facebook” showing the pitfalls of facebook fan page campaigns, questioning the strategy to lure more people to like the page without any business implications. The article didn’t go well with the readers, as readers were unhappy with the under-statement of the ‘like’ button and its consequences in social media marketing.

Source : reface.me

Even I have been asked a lot of times by business owners on the benefit of Facebook Like. They have a simple question in mind, “Why do people like the page?” and “What is it that they are expecting out of it?”

Well, the answer to those questions could mean delving deep into online user’s psychology. In addition to that, connecting with the business value would mean delving into the internet economic principles, which is still only an approximation.

But out of my experience and some understanding, I have managed to put down a list of top 10 reasons why I think people would like a page. The list starts with the most stupid reasons to more genuine reason. This will help us identify the right kinds of audience and get meaningful insights from our Facebook page.

1. Because you are a spammer !!
Most of the active users of Facebook maintain more than one profile. Though Facebook is getting tough on multiple profile management, the number of fake users is becoming uncontrollable on facebook fan page. These profiles have a tendency to like pages randomly, without any reason and involve in contest and so forth. They could really be a party crashers, if you are holding some contests or promotions. They also tend to spam your page with their content and links.

2. Curiosity and Guilt
These are two distinct reasons leading to similar kind of fans. First they really don’t know what to expect from the fan page. But because they land on this beautifully designed landing page, they are tempted to just like the page, hoping for no gratification besides liking the page. The other is the feeling of guilt – this happens with pages that show off their dedication for a specific social cause. Somehow people click on the social cause page without intention of doing anything and run into a dilemma of moral obligation.

3. Discounted Offers
You have many pages announcing nothing but discounted coupons and deals. Enough reason for people to like and click on the links. So if you are running any such offers, without a doubt majority of fans will be from this category.

4. Contest and More Contest
Contest and Campaign are the core strategy of facebook fan page. Many social media agencies and marketers, start their strategy with a concept to engage with users through contests and campaigns. There are many creative campaigns which are genuinely interesting like the recent one from Kurkure but many are there just to grab more likes without any effort to engage with the brand. That is one of the key reasons for strict Facebook’s Promotional terms and conditions. It’s obvious that Facebook doesn’t want its platform to be useless.

5. Your friends forced you to
Some of the interesting fan you have must be those people who have been tormented by their friends to like the page. But there numbers are very less and they are hardly engaging, unless you torment them to even comment 

6. Local Relevance of the Page
Now we are moving into more reasonable reasons to like your page. First thing is that you have local relevance to the people. Suppose you find a page that is basically targeting user base around the place you live, why wouldn’t you like it? Even just to be in the community of local people and know news and events happening around the place is very useful. The number of likes could be thousands or more, but that is enough to bring in business and communicate important information.

7. Interesting Epic Content
There are many pages whose sole purpose is to share interesting content. Some are educational, scientific and inspirational. Usually the popularity of these kinds of pages is due to viral content and nothing else. Each of these pages will, some time strike upon the right epic content which will go viral, promoting their pages everywhere. Mostly these kinds of pages have around 10K fans on average.

More importantly, the entry point for these kinds of pages is either Facebook Notes or Facebook Videos. Facebook Video allows an interactive way for people to like the page if they like the content. This has helped a lot of pages to gain immediate fan base, though most of these video content are copyrighted. In addition to this, the value of Facebook Notes as an influential platform to share content is missed by many brands/businesses. Many of these viral notes are really creative and interesting writings that immediately capture people’s attention, thereby going viral.

Source : mptoons.com

8. News Distribution
Off course, most of us login to Facebook every morning for news, just to know what the hell is going around in the world. This is because it’s obvious that your friends are spread all around the world and they become your news reporters. You get to know from Bin Laden’s death to E.Coli out-break. But in addition to your friendly reporters, you also tend to add more authentic contents from top news sites, so you like their pages to receive daily updates, which really save a lot of your time.

These users are veracious readers and will go through the news content, comment on them and even share. If your page has enough trust then it can also be the sole source of news information for these fans.

9. For a Causes
You have many pages which are only for cause for example “Say no to SMOKING” to “Proud to be SINGLE”. These pages are not really for engagement purpose but just to collect votes on the issues and generate activism. Facebook and Twitter is emerging platform for online activism, but Facebook is trying to become stricter with its terms and condition as any kind of activism related to religion could be lethal for the platform. Even than it’s an important platform to voice public opinion.

10. Likable Brand or Personality
Finally we come to the real reason for liking the page and it’s because you really like it. The page is either related to your favourite brand or favourite personality – the only reason why ‘LIKE’ button makes so much of sense. I like John Mayer’s page because genuinely I love this artist and his songs, and would love to be updates with his new shows or albums.

Source : bbcenter.com

Finally, it is important to realize why you own a page. I think it is important for any business to understand that, there are different kinds of way in which facebook pages can be leveraged.

In social media, it’s important to define your crowd or networks. Here are 3 ways in which you can look at your network:

1. Audience

Crowd that listen to you and engage with your daily content. They don’t have to be your customers or clients, but simply an audience with whom you engage in different levels. This helps you to reach out to crowd and spread your words. But maintaining audience is a tough business and can be costly. Many top brands have audience.

The engagement happens in open platforms.

2. Users

Users are the real people who use your product for free. This strategy works best with freemium model based products. You have millions of users of your product who uses your product and talk about them, leveraging your product and service beyond your reach.

The engagement can happen in open platforms and closed forums.

3. Customers/Clients

They are your highly paid customers that bring revenue to your business. Their numbers are less but they gain enough trust on you from your audience or user base.

The engagement can happen in open platforms, closed forums or even through emails.

In a nutshell, a business has to know what kind of audience they want and based on that make strategy to gain them in Facebook page or Twitter.

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