Why you need to STOP participating in ‘Follow Trains’ or ‘Engagement Pods’
Almost daily I see small business owners asking for help to get their business pages off the ground or give their posts a bit of extra momentum by asking for a ‘follow for a follow’ or a ‘like my post’ call out. Seeing these makes my soul die a little as while I’m sure it seems like it’s a good idea and is taken innocently as a way to get things going, the reality is you are setting yourself up for a world of pain in the long term.
So whilst I know this is potentially going to be a #unpopularopinion I’m gonna tell you straight up. Don’t do it!!
Here are 5 reasons why!
You are going to completely screw up the algorithm and this will be to the detriment of your organic and paid advertising reach over time.
Social media platforms are really just big data machines that follow a series of instructions based on the information that is provided to them. Primarily they are set for engagement. Therefore you need to make sure that the people who are following you are GENUINELY interested in your product or service and potentially going to buy from your business. ‘Likes’ and ‘Follows’ are really just a vanity metric, if you have over a thousand followers but few of them are truly engaged in your content and you get a mere handful of interactions when you post – you will be penalised by the algorithm as it deems your content as pretty uninteresting and therefore will be shown to less people. It’s a race to the bottom, and I think a contributing reason why on average only 5.5% of people that follow pages see a post nowadays.
It will affect your ability to create quality custom audiences such as for retargeting or using ‘look-a-likes’
If you go to create custom audiences for retargeting or utilising look-a-likes from your Facebook or Instagram page followers you will have a bunch of profiles of people that are completely irrelevant to your business but for which you have told Facebook and Instagram ARE the types of user profiles you want to be targeting. This in turn creates a low quality audience pool and makes it that much harder for the algorithms to work with and optimise for, affecting your campaign results which will cost you in the long run as it will take longer for the algorithm to learn who your ideal audiences really are..
You are breaching the Facebook and Instagram Community Guidelines
In Facebooks own words “Every day, people use Facebook to share their experiences, connect with friends and family, and build communities. We are a service for more than two billion people to freely express themselves across countries and cultures and in dozens of languages. We recognise how important it is for Facebook to be a place where people feel empowered to communicate, and we take our role seriously in keeping abuse off our service”
To that end Facebook and Instagram are really cracking down on Accounts now that are demonstrating inauthentic behaviour in order to maintain the platforms integrity. Engaging in Follow trains, Like for Like or Engagement / Instagram pods is actually against the community standards on Facebook and Instagram and could get your account shut down for ‘inauthentic behaviour’ – read more on the community guidelines here.
Having a shitload of ‘Followers’ or ‘Likes’ doesn’t = $
You cant make $ off likes and follows if these people aren’t genuinely interested in buying from you! These are simply just vanity metrics, so stop wasting your time focusing on the number and put your attention and energy into creating great content for attracting and building a community that DOES care about you and WILL buy from you!
It’s SUPER LAZY MARKETING
Falling for the quick wins and cheap vanity metrics is NOT what marketing is about. Marketing is about building relationships with your ideal clients and customers and it takes time and effort – there are no quick wins or shortcuts here and trying to build short term results on short term tactics is never going to set the foundation for a stable and scalable business.. Sorry to burst that bubble but you are gonna have to roll your sleeves up and be in this for the long haul. You can achieve this if you just keep showing up, being consistent with your messaging and being authentically YOU!
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