Facebook just updated its platform policies effectively banning the practice of “Like-gating” a feature found not only on our page tab apps, but in others as well.
This tactic has been pretty effective in generating (okay, forcing) incremental likes for pages. We’ve seen this work so many times and coupled with a great offer, translates to a win-win for everyone. But in light of declining newsfeed coverage and page reach, this is forcing all of us to find other ways to make social a high performing channel for our businesses.
The most immediate reaction of people now is towards enforcement. Considering that there are over millions of fan pages out there, a lot of people think that the arduous task of penalizing pages is almost impossible. Either way, if you’re running a promotion right now, it’s time to come up with a plan B.
Take A Step Back – Based on our experience, Facebook will always be the “assisting channel” so come up with ways to drive traffic to your site. It’s time to focus on optimizing images you use on your newsfeed, specially ones that link back to your site. There’s absolutely no one-size-fits-all approach to this and in fact, even the notion of post a picture and ask a question is not performing as well even. Always look at your post performance from time to time and optimize from there.
Focus on getting emails not likes – Email Campaigns provide better performance than just getting likes in terms of meeting your marketing objectives. Tab apps are still a great way to enhance your acquisition campaigns and designing your campaigns in such a way that it helps you collect emails will just increase your chances of converting users. Maybe you used to display a coupon right after a page is liked. You can just change the form by requesting for an email and sending the coupon straight to their inbox.
It’s time to put advertising to the mix – Well, this was inevitable. Long gone are the days of great organic traffic going to your page. Depending on how much you want to grow your likes, you can probably get likes from $0.05 to $0.90 running a well targeted campaign.
Just Move On – Facebook’s known to change its policies regularly and this wasn’t really much of a surprise (also, you might want to put down your pitch fork). If you’ve been doing a great job sharing great content and clearly engaging your users with or without these like gates, then you’re fine.
Are Likes Really a Big Deal Nowadays? Shift your focus to conversion optimization!
Besides, your objective is to really drive conversions to your owned properties, it could be an app or your website. That’s so much valuable than “cheap” likes.