Facebook Like For Like Is Damaging Your Organic Reach – #17 One Minute Social Media Moment

I’m in a lot of Facebook blogging groups. Some of them are all about sharing knowledge, some of them are just about sharing content and others… well some I’m not sure about.

I joined them to meet other bloggers and yes, to share my content with people I thought might find it helpful or share it.

The value of these groups varies. The discussion groups are really helpful, I can ask questions and find out what blogging issues are important to others. I can also help out when someone asks about something within my expertise.

There are one or two groups that I’m struggling to see value in and these ones seem to be a constant stream of people asking for Facebook page likes. Most are ‘Like for Like’ threads. The idea is, you ask for a page like and will like the other pages in return.

On the surface, this seems like a supportive thing to do. It helps everyone build their numbers and push their content out further right?

I’ve seen quite a bit of comment on these pages recently complaining that people are Liking and unlocking and calming it’s not fair.

It’s true, if you agree to take part in Like for Like it doesn’t seem right to instantly unlike the page once the job is done but there are far bigger concerns than this.

‘Just hide the page posts if you don’t want to see them’ one commenter says…

To see why this is damaging your page rather than building it lets talk about the Facebook page algorithm.

How Like for Like Is Damaging Your Facebook Reach

How Do You Know If You Are Getting Negative Feedback?

Facebook considers the following negative feedback:

1. Hide post
2. Hide all posts
3. Report as spam
4. Unlike page

We will all see some negative feedback from time to time. Most of the time it’s nothing to worry about but if we frequently get a lot of negative feedback the Facebook algorithm steps in.

Facebook assumes that if you get a lot of negative feedback you are producing poor quality content and will start to penalise all your posts in future. That means you will start to see very low organic reach on all your posts.

Here’s how to find out if you are getting negative feedback on your page:

What to do if you are getting large amounts of negative feedback:

1. Review the content you are posting. Is it interesting, informative, entertaining or educational? If it doesn’t fit into one of these categories you shouldn’t be posting it.
2. Stop looking for Likes from people who have no interest in your business or industry.
3. Consider setting up a targeted ‘Likes’ ad to build a more relevant audience.
4. Target your organic posts to segments of your audience. You can do this by location, gender age and interest. (see below)

Your Turn

Are you getting a lot of negative feedback? What have you done to combat it? Let me know in the comments below