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Want to help your friend's business? Stop what you've been doing!

Posted By: / April 18, 2020
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It's incredibly tough out there and millions of people are sat home and in some cases furloughed, or trying to save their business and are feeling pretty helpless. Some advice has been going viral across Facebook and it's actually going to be pretty damaging. Here, Rachel Allen of 13Ten Marketing explains why you nees to stop inviting all your friends to like another friend's small business page because you might be doing more harm than good! 
Before I start, I don't want to minimise anyone's efforts and obviously these intitiatives have all been taken in good faith. But please take a read of these examples to see how inviting your friends to like another business page will potentially damage their business and cost them money in the long run. Here’s why.
I won’t go to get my nails done at a salon in another county. Many others wouldn’t either. But if I like that businesses Facebook page and If this business does a Facebook post it's likely that say 10% of their audience will respond. The remaining 90% won't respond because they will simply never buy from them because of geography or because they weren't interested in the service in the first place.
Facebook is pretty canny and they will see that this page only gets engagement from 10% of their audience so they will rank this page down, because the engagement is low.
So this poor salon won’t get their posts seen because people aren’t engaging in the posts - but they’re the wrong people! It’s better to have a smaller number of followers who actually engage rather than a large number who don’t.
If this salon did Facebook ads, it would be reasonable to set up their ads based on the demographics of the followers on the page. But, the ads will display to a bunch of people in an area who will never buy because they are too far away. Or who just liked the page to try to be nice.
o this salon will spend money on ads, targeting people who will not buy.
This is a better set of things to do instead.
  1. Help your friends by finding a great post on their Facebook page and share it to your timeline. Add a little context, explain why they’re awesome. What great things they provide.
    Tag some friends in these posts who you think would really, really love this. Make sure it’s a service they’d be able to afford and travel to.
  2. f you use their product or service, take a photo or do a video so that people can see it in action. They can then decide to follow the page if they’re interested.
  3. o to their Facebook page and leave a review. The business can then use this as content for their social media.
  4. o to Google and type their web address in. You can leave a review on google which will help their search engine ratings.
ask your clients to do this for you instead, not go through their friends list and actually makes the situation cost you more money longer term!  Good luck, it is tough out there!
 
Find out more about Rachel Allen and 13Ten Marketing here.
 
 
 

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