Why you Shouldn't Invite your Friends to Like your Facebook Business Page

You know how Facebook is always encouraging you to grow your group or page by inviting your friends to like it?

I don’t think that’s a good idea. Here’s why.

It’s tempting to invite your friends and family members to like your Facebook page. After all they are friends, so they’ll probably say yes. And in so doing, it will look like your page has more followers, which is a good thing. It provides us with that social proof we’re looking for. It makes it seem like we have a bigger audience than we do. How could this be a bad thing?

The Facebook Algorithm – How it Works

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Facebook algorithm. If not, I have a great video, explaining how it works and how to maximize your post to take advantage of it.

Briefly, Facebook algorithm is the brain behind Facebook that pushes content to people on the app.

Here’s a brief thought experiment. You probably have hundreds of friends on Facebook. You also are probably a member of several groups and are following several pages. All of these hundreds of pages, groups, and people are posting regularly to Facebook. Yet you only see a handful of these posts. Why? There were probably 1000 posts made today by the pages in groups that you follow yet you only saw a few.

Well, Facebook had to curate the content. It had to look at these posts and decide which ones were right for you.

It does this because it wants you to have an enjoyable experience on its platform. Because if you do, you will stay on it longer, and in so doing you will see more ads. Which helps make Facebook more money.

So Facebook has developed an algorithm that is constantly looking at the content you find enjoyable and trying to make sure that you see more of it. It’s also looking at the content that you post and trying to determine who it is right for and the algorithm is going to make sure that it pushes that content to people who will find it enjoyable.

The Right Audience

So when you post something, and people start to interact with it. The Algorithm begins looking at what these people have in common so that it knows who to share this post, and your future posts with.

When I share a post from my business page Rethink Math Teacher, and it starts getting liked by a bunch of middle school math teachers, the algorithm figures that out. And then it starts to push that content to other middle school math teachers. And if they engage with it, it will continue to do this until people stop finding it interesting. Then it will stop promoting my post to new people (and to my audience) and send them something else to look at.

If, however, I have invited 200 of my friends and family members to like my page, and then I post something that middle school math teachers will like. It will show up in the feed of several of my friends (or my family members). And since they are not middle school math teachers, they won’t like it, and the post will die before ever being seen by anyone it’s intended for.

Well, you might be thinking, no worries. My friends and family will like the post.

That too is disadvantageous. Because, as mentioned above, if your posts starts to do well, and get good engagement, the algorithm will push this post to more people who are just like the ones who have already interacted with it. And since your friends and family aren’t middle school math teachers, it will get pushed to the wrong type of people (people who are like your friends and family). These new people still won’t engage with it, and it will again die.

All of this will stifle the reach of your posts and the growth of your page.

What if I have Zero Followers?

If you have no followers, and you share the page with your friends and family members to get a few people following the site, just for that social proof, I won’t yell at you. But it still will have the opposite effect.

There are a few things you can do instead.

You should create engaging, insightful, or fun content and share it in relevant groups. Or promote it on Facebook and optimize it for page follows. You could spend $20 and get a pretty decent return on investment.

Another strategy is to share this post with your email list, on your blog, or on other social media platforms and use the URL of the post. This way people will be brought to your Facebook business page, and this post, where they are much more likely to be able to click on the ‘like page’ button. You could do this on Reddit and have some decent success. You can also do it on Pinterest, though the success you find there might take more time than these other strategies.

Want more help growing your Facebook page?

If you want help starting and growing your Facebook group, you can check out my online course on Organic Facebook Reach. I also have some free resources on growing your Facebook page that you are welcome to download.