It’s Not Just About The Fans

Everyone wants more likes on their page—the higher the number, the more gratifying you feel. Despite being a respected and legitimate business, you still want more fans because, well, it’s validating and feels good !

When first starting out with your new Facebook fan page, sometimes new fans are hard to come by. Or even later on, you’ll start to feel as if your fan count is stagnant, and simply won’t budge. It can be discouraging, but don’t let this get you down, because there are other, even more important numbers to focus on.

Just because your fan number may be low doesn’t mean that non-fans aren’t going to your page or seeing your content. This is where your “weekly reach” and your “talking about” numbers come into play. Pay close attention to these numbers, because they more accurately calculate how well (or not well!) your page is doing.

The “people talking about” metric is defined as the number of people who have generated a story from interacting with your content. Anyone who has shared, liked, commented or responded to any of your Facebook content is reflected in this metric.

The second and more important metric is the “weekly reach”– it measures how many Facebook users total have seen any type of content from your page (whether they are already a fan of your page or not).

So why are these numbers important? These two numbers work hand-in-hand; the more people who “talk about” your content, the more it’s going to spread to other people, increasing your “weekly reach” number. People don’t have to be a fan of your page to see your content, so the “weekly reach” metric gives you a more accurate take on who is seeing your page, versus just the fan number.
We always keep our clients’ weekly reach numbers higher than their fan count—this means that more people than their fans are seeing their content, which means that we are doing our job.

Take the picture above for example. Those are actual insights from my client. Their fan count is only at 78, but they are reaching 1,667 people weekly!

As a social media agency, we get it. We know you want more likes. And even though we preach and push for the importance of engagement on social media, believe us, we want the fan number to go up, too! But growing your fan base organically takes time, and if you are not seeing the immediate growth that you wanted, don’t fret—this is normal. For now, concentrate on posting up compelling and great content and getting it in front of as many people as you can. The fans will come in, we promise.