This Hidden Facebook Button Will Get Your Business Page Free Organic Likes

Don’t let the title fool you—I’m not delusional. Likes don’t matter. While organic reach may not be dead, it’s certainly retired and bought a nice little sports car. By this point it’s probably considering investing in a restaurant somewhere. Edgerank Checker found that organic reach for the average Facebook Business Page dropped from 16% to 6.5% from February 2012 to March 2014, while Social@Ogilvy states that pages with more than 500,000 likes may see an organic reach as low as 2%.

While likes don’t carry the significance they used to, my father had a saying, “Never look a gift horse carrying an organic like for your Facebook page in the mouth.” Yes, I know, he was incredibly specific. He also said once, “Harry, sometimes you’ll quote me in your blog posts and it will be so specific that people will think you’re making it up as you go.” Truly prophetic really.

OK, OK – What is it already?

Sorry, cutting to the chase has never been my strong suit. Kind of like that time I… oh yeah—sorry.

I recently stumbled across a simple Facebook trick that will let you invite people who have liked your posts, but not your page, to come and like your page. Free, targeted likes. Pretty swell, huh? It’s not every day you find free functionality on Facebook.

Here’s what you do.

Don’t Like Reading? There’s a List for That…

Here’s how you go about inviting folks who have liked your posts but don’t like your page… yet (insert evil mastermind laugh here).

1. Log in to Facebook and go to your Business page.
2. Write a crazy-engaging Facebook post that people will like.
   
3. Watch the likes flow in.
   
4. Once you’ve gotten a few likes, go back to the post and click on the link that shows the people who have liked your post.
   
5. Here, you’ll be able to invite people who have liked your posts but not your page, to come over and like your page as well.
   

Pretty simple, right? Facebook will only let you do this a certain number of times (The limit seems to be somewhere between 500–1,000), but the limit is temporary. Once you run out of invites, just take a break, rinse, and repeat.

Is It Worth It?

In my limited experience, yes. Other articles and comments I’ve read on this have said they’re getting a conversion rate of anywhere from 10-25%, but I saw results that were better than that.

I invited 247 people to like our business page about 7 days ago. Of those 247, 99 have liked the page. I’m no math whiz, but I know people who went to Georgia Tech, and they tell me this is a 40.1% conversion rate. These numbers may be skewed a bit because of the industry we’re in and the relatively small sample size. We also do a lot of targeted ads and then invite the people who interact with these ads to like our page, which would probably drive up these numbers.

It’s also a very quick process, so I plan to continue doing this from time to time.

In The End

Clients ask me all of the time about the importance of likes on their Facebook Business Page and inquire about running a campaign to generate likes on their page. I always tell them the same thing: don’t buy likes. While it is important to have a respectable number of likes for the purpose of social proof, don’t get too caught up in it. This being said, a quality organic like never hurt anyone.

Originally published by Harry Kierbow