Dear Bob (not his real name),
I “liked” your Facebook page (as you requested) but I don’t know if I LIKE IT like it.
Now I’m sounding like a middle school girl responding to someone who has a crush on her. In fact, I think I’ve hit upon a pretty universally applicable sentence framework. It works as is for middle school crushes. Now take everything after the “BUT I don’t know if” and change it to “I’ll have sex with you” and it gets you through high school and college. Change it to “I love you” and it gets you through your 20’s. Change it to “I’ll hire you” and it gets you through many conversations as a business owner and finally “I’ll let you borrow the car tonight” gets you through your kids being in school.
But I digress.
The reason I don’t know if I like his Facebook page – or more accurately his request – is because I have a suspicion that it’s a waste of time. Not my time. It only took me 10 seconds to find the page and click LIKE. But his time. Does he need to spend time getting people to like his page? Does he need to spend time even having a Facebook page? Does he even know, or is he just doing it because it seems like the thing to do?
There are only 3 things a company needs to do:
1. Make something people want to pay for.
2. Find those people and sell to them.
3. Build an organization that does the first 2 repeatedly at a profit.
I’m pretty sure more likes on the Facebook page aren’t doing #1 or #3. So that leaves #2. Are they helping the sales? In Bob’s favor is the fact that people do have a herd mentality. They tend to do things more readily if they see lots of other people doing it. But Bob’s is a B2B company. He sells to other businesses. I wonder if he knows who visits his Facebook page? Are the visitors actually his market? If they are, when they visit the page, are they clueless or more often are they curious about his offerings? How many come when they are serious and ready to buy?
Unless he knows who’s visiting and what they do or don’t do after a visit, Bob can’t design the page to do what prospects need at that stage. And if you do something for a potential customer (even a supposedly good thing) but you do it at the wrong time it can hurt your sales not help them.
So here’s what I’m really saying to Bob. Are you getting data about your effort how promoting the Facebook page is affecting sales or are you just doing it because you think you should? If it’s the latter, spend that time doing stuff you know generates sales – until you have enough revenue that you can hire someone to do the data analysis for you
