Back in December last year I wrote one of my first blog posts for SEOptimise entitled “How you can get over 79 Twitter followers in under 23 minutes – and why not to bother”.
From the title of the post, you can imagine that this post is regarding a similar topic, so you will not be required to do any of the following:
- Write a ground-breaking blog post announcing how you have revolutionised the world
- Give away freebies in order to be liked
- Do any sort of “Like Gating”
Over the past decade, as blogging and social media marketing have become increasingly popular, some companies are now even outsourcing their blogs to be written by another agency.
I was surprised the other day when talking to a friend about how they measured the success of their company’s blog, that she mentioned one of their factors was getting more “Facebook Likes”. At that moment I cringed, but it also gave me inspiration to write this.
Learning Objectives
Today’s post will show you how to get free likes on your blog post, but will also show you that getting 1000 Likes as opposed to 10 makes no real difference. I’ll also show you alternatives to how you can better monitor the success of your blogging campaign.
How to get Free Facebook Blog Post Likes
In order to start acquiring more Facebook Likes for a blog post, you will need an active Facebook account.
Firstly, login to your Facebook account and decide which blog post you wish to promote. I have chosen a dated blog post that I have found online so as to try and make sure no “real people” would be liking the post any time soon:
Then grab the webpage URL and post it to another Facebook accounts page, as shown below:
Do wait for the image to load up, like above and not like below; if you post without the load of the preview image, it will not register as a like:
After you have finished posting, hit the refresh button and keep posting to your heart’s content, as below:
Why doing this is useless for your brand
Although I am sure many of you could get more than 24 likes in the time I have done this, using Facebook likes as a blog performance metric is a poor way to gauge how well your blog is performing. As awesome as it may be to get a thousand likes for your business, if none of these convert to leads or sales, it is purely a vanity figure and therefore useless.
Measuring the Success of Your Blog
In looking at measuring the success of your blog there are a variety of other ways, one of the most obvious being traffic to the blog, which you can drive down to further factors. With a simple tool such as Google Analytics there are other factors to help measure the success of your blog such as:
- Page Views
- Traffic Sources
- Conversions to subscribers
There are many other more advanced ways to measure the success of your blog but all things start simple and then progress further.
Remember, a blog should be looked as an extension to your company’s brand image and used as a marketing tool to attract new business, and not on these vanity figures such as likes, followers and stumbles.
Image from Flickr courtesy of jwlphotography
Thank you for this blog. It’s an important point that sometimes people focus on a vanity point (number of likes) and lose the main point of the blog – finding leads. As you say, there are much better indicators than the number of likes for how well a blog is performing.
LoL, i think think post should be called “How you can get 24 Facebook Likes on your blog post in less than 14 minutes – and why not to bother and lose a few friends at the same time”
Nah its too long. :D
Interesting. Do you think these likes have any effect on your blog as far as SEO is concerned? I know what it comes to SERP rankings, Google is quite fond of social signals these days, hence why people are willing to spend a pretty penny just to get Facebook likes/Google +1s/etc.
- Spencer
Numbers don’t “really” matter – I’d much prefer to influence someone and yet not get a Facebook like than the other way round. If you write for your audience and don’t chase follows/likes, then you’re going to be much more successful in the long run.
Now a day i am also busy with collecting LIKE for my FB Fanpage. I have an active account but i have created a independent business page and requesting my friends to LIKE my page. I am getting LIKE but the progress is not so satisfactory. I will follow your trick to increase LIKEs. I have doubt that this facebook likes help the main to site to rank well in SERP. But i know this fan page is maintained carefully can bring direct business.
Many thanks guys for your comments!
@Caz SEO, exactly right, there are many other ways in measuring your blogging KPIs
@Aaron Yes a bit too long! :) … However notice how I refer to them not as “friends” but accounts within the blog ;)
@Spencer W in essence you are building a link from Facebook to your site, so there would be some sort of link value…
@Tudor Davies exactly right, write good quality content and relevant content to your target market and it will work wonders :)
@SEOCompanyIndia this is also a nice way to “encourage” people to like your page too, so you create a snowball effect
Thank you for you all your comments any other suggestions and thoughts, please keep them coming :)
Nowadays we can find Likes Exchenge Systems everywhere, however I think we should focus on real Likes.
Caption contests and give-aways have been working well for us to gain more likes. I’ve been wondering though, maybe we should be doing the contests on our blog instead of the Facebook page?
Likes are likes.There are 90% loyal likes out of 100.I build 400 likes within 2days so everyone is loyal and real.And nice post Pak Hou as always.
You can check out my facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/InetGeneration
Great tips for increasing the potential to get Likes. It isn’t easy to do but the more Likes you get the more traffic you potentially can get to that post.
In an ideal world you would create a Facebook page, write a great post and everyone would instantly ‘like’ it, however, unfortunately life doesn’t always work like this so great tips like yours Pak are really helpful to help oil the wheels so to speak. Cheers
If youre having trouble getting likes to your fanpage, you can always buy them. This will make your fanpage more visible in FB search engine,
There are many Facebook services on the net, often expensive and not worth your time, Ive used: facebook2k-likes.blogspot.com, I bought package of 2300 likes for 8$, seems like a good deal for me