The question
Do you have any tips for getting more Facebook friends, Facebook followers, and Twitter followers? My attorney boss really wants those numbers to go up. I really want to be more authentic with my comments and posts, but I’m worried about being too real. I know I need to represent the law firm professionally, so I hold back and it’s all just super boring.
My answer
I’m not going to talk about Twitter cause I don’t do a lot on Twitter. Twitter overwhelms me. I’ve just managed to stay off of Twitter. I don’t do a lot with Twitter, so I’m not an expert on that.
Now about Facebook followers and friends… If we’re talking about a business page — and I had a conversation with a client about this very thing this morning — it doesn’t really matter what the number of people is because the reach is so small.
About engagement campaigns on Facebook
Facebook has become pay to play. So if it’s just a vanity game, then you can just run ads that are basically just an engagement campaign.
I don’t ever do these because I don’t care about likes, but you can run a Facebook ad that is kind of an engagement campaign. If you go into the ads manager and you go into the different goals, there are different types: there’s a reach, and there’s traffic, and then there’s engagement and different things like that.
And I’m almost positive that within engagement or within reach, there’s a place in there where you can actually invite people to like the page. That means you can run ads to get people to like the page. So that’s one way you can do it.
I mean, don’t BUY likes. Definitely, do not buy likes because that’s going to screw all your stuff up.
A better way to get more likes
Here’s what I would do instead if your boss really cares about it: I would probably create a really good post, a post that solves a problem.
So, for example, here’s one thing we did for a traumatic brain injury attorney: we created a guide that taught clients how to set up a GoFundMe campaign after an accident. A lot of times, people get into an accident and they need money because they can’t work. You know the drill.
So we said: “Here is a step-by-step guide that teaches you how to set up a GoFundMe campaign so that you can get your friends and family to help out and cover some of your living expenses and medical expenses.” This is also helpful after a wrongful death type of situation. You see these things spring up all the time.
So, we created a guide that shows exactly how to do that and we ran ads to that post and that post, because you’re paying for it, gets a ton of likes, a ton of comments and it’s actually useful.
Compare this to a page that isn’t really useful
Compare that to s a Facebook page that just isn’t really useful. For example, my Facebook page — my Andrew Stickel entrepreneur business Facebook page — I really have no idea how many likes I have. I might have 10 likes, I might have a thousand likes, I have no idea because I just haven’t looked at it.
I just don’t care because I know it doesn’t help me because the reach is just so small. Sure, you can spend this money on building up likes. And if you have just 5 likes, then maybe you should try to invest a little bit to get a couple of hundred likes on there, but it’s a point of diminishing returns.
What you should do
If you do a good job and you provide value, then people will start liking you. If you put that guide out there, then people will like you. It’s just how it works. So, that’s what I would do. I mean, you can run the Facebook ads, you can ask people — but providing value is probably the best way to do it.
