Facebook Likes are not Fans, let alone Lovers.

It’s a small change, but something marketers have overlooked to their detriment. In 2011, amidst the flurry of changes made to how Facebook Pages looked was the introduction of a more Open Graph. Along with that was the announcement of a minor change in nomenclature.

Facebook fans were renamed as Facebook likes.

Read that sentence again and think about its significance.

That change had signified Facebook’s move towards being a serious advertising platform – clicking on the thumbs up of a Page is a sign of association, so that advertisers on Facebook can create more effective ads through interest-based targeting.

In other words, the act of a user liking a Page is no different from a user looking up hotel reviews on Google. Both will result in hotel-booking ads being served to you in the sidebar. Both are treated as equivocal 1 in a sea of 0s. There are no extra ‘points’ for being a Facebook ‘fan’.

Marketers however, still believe that these ‘likes’ are their ‘fans’; that they are partial to the brand and would love to ‘engage’ every waking moment. It is a fallacy to correlate a million ‘likes’ to a million-strong community of brand lovers.

This phenomenon has a powerful effect on efficacy. For example, we have observed an organic reach dip of 12% to 5% in the pages we manage. To illustrate one consequence, if a marketer spends $25,000 to engage their 100,000-strong ‘fan’ base, each post would have reached 12,000 people in the past. Now, the same post would only reach an average of 5,000. The cost of reach has just skyrocketed from $2.08 to $5 per impression today.

The panic is upon us. “I have invested so much in recruiting my fans – of what value are they now if I cannot enjoy the audience reach savings I get compared to digital banner ads?”

The solution for marketers is to think like a marketer geared towards getting value in return, and not a brand looking for love. Here are 3 ways to rethink Facebook Page Likes.

1. Page Likes are valuable only because they help your ads reach more suitable audiences

Since the people who like your Page only 28% more likely to purchase from your brand compared to a non-fan, don’t bank on them to give you a difference in sales. Instead, rethink ‘likes’ primarily as a funneling process of the public towards a higher prospective pool of people that will likely be more receptive to sales/promotional messages, so at least your ads are displayed to people who are interested in that category.

Example: Bud Light took their best performing content on Facebook and amplified it using promoted post ads, thereby showing it to the people most likely to be affected by it.

The content was then exposed to known fans of Bud Light, and fans of other beer brands, beer-related activities and sports. This ensured that the specific content that existing fans of Bud Light were engaging with at the highest level was exposed to a receptive audience. TBG's promoted Facebook activity for Bud Light resulted in an 18x increase in targeted reach for the same spend, compared to regular Facebook ads.

Source: WARC

2. Turn Page Likes into an instant customer research panel

Page Likes can be useful in other ways. Because people who like the Page are already more pre-disposed to interact with a brand, they become a perfect source for consumer insights and feedback in a much faster and organic manner. Marketers will still have to incentivize consumers in order to receive feedback, but the return is high given the speed and responses from consumers about your new product design, flavors or even functionalities that marketing research companies will take months to find out.

The extra bonus of using Page Likes as a testing bed for ideas or products also comes when people find their opinions about the brand valued or taken seriously. Treat your consumers like you would your mother, and not a captive pool of idiots willing to receive marketing messages.

Example: Many large brands, including LEGO Group (Antorini et al, 2013), Dell Computers (Degen, 2010), and Starbucks (Degen, 2010) have benefited from the new product ideas that their communities have provided, in particular because their customers have such in-depth knowledge of the products being researched. Further, communities can sometimes increase product loyalty (Ryzhkova, 2012).

Source: Warc

3. Find your real fans hidden in the mountain of likes, and reward them excessively.

These people won’t number in the millions or thousands, but they are more likely to hear, share, promote, defend and buy into what you do. The real work lies in identifying those fans through Page analytics and real community management (recognizing the names of who’s commenting positively week after week), and being able to contact them through non-creepy ways. One of the ways is to find if these ‘super fans’ already exist on your marketing databases which everyone collects but seldom use – then it simply becomes a matter of matching both sets of names to find consumers who have given permission for a brand to contact them via email.

Example: KFC Arabia rewards its top Facebook fans by providing them with competitions that enable its most ardent fans to attend the live shows of popular reality TV offerings sponsored by KFC such as ‘Arab Idol’, ‘Arabs Got Talent’ and ‘The Voice’ and be a part of the backstage experience alongside the judges and competitors.

Source: The Saudi Gazette

Twitter Example: Taco Bell recently created a set of eight custom Taco Bell rings to send to its influential Twitter followers. The ring set included two rings, one that says “Taco” and the other “Bell.” The recipients of the rings happily tweeted and Instagramed pictures of their new rings, with each tweet receiving at least 300 retweets by other followers.

Source: Digiday