Are you reaching friends of your page “Likers”?

Did you know that the content on Facebook is primarily consumed within the Likers newsfeed, rather than on the page? Plus, Facebook has found that if a brand posts five days out of seven only 16% of its fans will see the content. All of this of course strengthens the case for writing engaging posts. But, wait there is more…

An analysis by Comscore onto the Power of Like for the top 100 pages on Facebook showed that for every Liker on the page an additional 34 friends per Likers can be reached, whereas for the top 1,000 pages it can be up to 81 friends per Liker. This is MASSIVE – no longer are you just talking to your small group, but instead you are talking to a potentially much larger number.

Obviously the number of friends of Likers that you reach will depend on your page, how many people like your page, the posts you write, how many friends your page Likers have and the engagement you get, but it does potentially change the way that you see your page Likers.

The diagram below from analysis on Bing’s Facebook page shows that with 1.7 million Likers/fans on their page they are actually potentially reaching a total of 232 million people!

But does this actually matter?

Well yes, because:

• Research found that people who Liked a page, their Facebook friends were more likely to visit your website than those who didn’t and we aren’t talking a little bit, in the lower results it was 55% of Likers and 33% of friends that were more likely…
• They also found that Likers and their friends exhibited higher brand engagement than the average internet user. On Facebook yes I get this, since you can’t interact on the page until you Like it, but it doesn’t specify not on Facebook…
• Finally the results showed that Likers and their friends spent more than the average internet user.

I don’t know if you had previously thought about the friends of your Likers, but if you didn’t, it is time to. If you are going to put the time and effort into Facebook then you want as many people as possible to see your content and learn about your page.

But how do you reach those friends of your Likers? It’s all about the content – every time a Liker interacts with your page it appears in their personal newsfeed where their friends can see it – so make your posts engaging!

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks mobile phone socks, Chief Rabbit at Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media, founder of Steps – the online Facebook and LinkedIn training course and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.