A like is not just a like when it comes to Facebook

 This morning I woke up to find my Facebook page had hit a lovely new milestone: 300 “likes” within a year of opening the page! I’m thrilled to bits, most of all because I know a lot of these people genuinely like my page – they’re not paid likes and the only like-for-likes are from other artists who’s work I enjoy anyway. The thing about statistics like these is that one can quickly become a wee bit obsessive about checking them day in day out, and I know a lot of page-owners can, in a moment of desperation, try to boost their follower-count by dishing out money to companies who claim to earn you thousands of likes quickly. Tempting though the idea of your work being seen by all those people can be, it doesn’t quite work like that - please please please don't waste your money on these schemes!
As many bloggers have pointed out before me, these paid likers aren’t actually real people but accounts made for the sole purpose of liking millions of pages, and therefore wont help your business in any way at all – the only thing they’ll do is raise that little number at the top of your screen. The way Facebook works is this: if your posts are getting lots of clicks, likes, shares, and comments from a good percentage of your likers, then it’ll deem them important and will show them to your followers and through them their friends. To encourage that kind of engagement, the likers obviously have to be interested in what you’re posting. See what I’m getting at here? The real fans are FAR more valuable in the long run, even if you’ve only got a handful, because if you’ve got 50 likes and say 30 people actively comment, like and share your posts, Facebook will think you’re more relevant than a page with 1000 and only a few active likers! :)

This can of course be a bit frustrating for page owners, I know I sometimes get seriously annoyed my new art posts aren’t being shown to all my followers, but there is a way to organically boost your post’s relevance: share them yourself! Not just on your personal page, but in groups devoted to whatever it is you’re posting. When I share a dog illustration from my page to all the various animal art groups I’m in, that post will get up to five times the amount of engagement it would get without sharing – and may, with a little luck, draw new real fans to my page! The groups are a natural way to show your posts to the people who are really interested, so use them as much as you can to get your work seen. The same principle works with groups as well as pages too, join the ones with say 1000 members or less, and your post will probably be seen by more people since they'll be more likely to be active members in the group. Also there are lots of massive generic art groups on Facebook, with hundreds of thousands of members, and you can bet your work will get buried under a million posts from all those other artists within minutes, which leads to nobody really taking any time to look at any of the posts on the page - there's simply too much!

To sum up:

• Your like count is just a number.
• The valuable likes are the genuine ones that engage with your posts, and really love your work!
• Facebook works in mysterious ways, so just focus on posting really good content and sharing it organically - it's the best you can do!
• Groups can be a real helping hand in getting your work seen by the right people, use them wisely!