Goodbye Likes, Followers are in! Facebook finally gets rid of the Likes button to simplify the way people can interact with the Pages they are interested in. The recent announcement made by Facebook aims to improve user experience by adding some changes to its layout, easier navigation between the user’s personal and public pages, a dedicated newsfeed for pages a user follows, and more customizable controls for Page admins. For months now we have been educating entrepreneurs not to focus on Likes as it is becoming more and more irrelevant as time goes by, and this just proved our point. Facebook is officially axing its Likes feature.

LIKES ARE A VANITY METRIC

Since the inception of Facebook Pages, “Likes” have been a way to determine how many people actually are interested in the Page and would see the Page’s post on their News Feed. However, when the “Follow” feature was introduced by Facebook, users now had the ability to Like the page, but not follow the Page’s posts, which not only made it confusing for users, but also for marketers as one could not determine why one metric would be preferred over the other. For digital marketers, they would conclude that the number of “Followers” seemed to be a more accurate metric on how much growth a Page has over time.

In the past few years, with the number of changes to Facebook’s algorithm, we have noticed that turns our, Likes do not matter anymore, as a user could also “follow” a page, but not “Like” it. Facebook started downplaying the Like function by hiding the number of Page Likes in the main fold of the page, and now it will be officially taken out. As Page admins then, how does this change affect us?

HOW THIS CHANGE AFFECTS PAGE ADMINS

Since Likes are now made obsolete, this poses a challenge for Page Admins who used to measures the number of Likes as a determinant of a Page’s success. Your efforts should veer away from asking people to “Like” your page and instead focus on creating QUALITY content that will make people WANT to follow the page. Social media marketing for businesses just got even more interesting. Good, relevant, timely and entertaining content is the key to an engaging Page.

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