How to Avoid Being "Unliked"

Last week, I spoke to a group of business owners and area leaders about social media marketing. I usually go through my 7 Step Process for setting up a social media strategy. The last step, after doing things like creating a social media policy and training your employees, is to promote your page and attempt to gain fans. This is done though writing great content that inspires your fans to engage in dialog with you. But this time, I spoke about a potential 8th step to the process.

KEEPING your fans.

Research is showing that more and more people are choosing to unlike pages who post too often or just don't provide value to their daily lives. Think about it, our Facebook walls are getting more and more cluttered as we add friends and like pages. Now we have to make choices about what really matters to us. This means we're going to be more selective on who we friend and what pages we like. But more importantly, it means that as business owners we have the potential to actually see our fan count go down.

To avoid the dreaded "unlike", you need great content.

So, as you can see the first three reasons are very similar. People were annoyed with too many posts that just weren't relevant for them. One again, great content prevails. This tells us that if you don't have anything of value to say... don't say it at all. As business owners, we're always strapped for time and sometimes it's tempting to just "throw something out on Facebook" when you're busy. However, this may no longer be a good strategy. This new trend shows that we're better off to focus our efforts on one GREAT post per week than five posts with little content value.

So, the next time you hit send on a post make sure what you're saying really matters. Otherwise, you may find that your fans are selecting that "unlike" button.