Why Business Owners Shouldn't Like & Comment on their Facebook Pages (& What They Should Do Instead)

Dear Business Owners - please stop "liking" and commenting on every post on your business page. It's a waste of your time and money and probably isn't doing a thing to drive business or engagement to your page.

Here's why:

1. Unless you're a "thought leader" on Facebook and have a massive following, filling your personal news feed with interactions with your business page isn't creating business for you. In fact, all it's probably doing is annoying your friends and making them hide you from their feeds. When something really exciting happens that you do want to share, they won't see it.
2. If you're paying someone to monitor your social channels, you're wasting their time and your money. When someone interacts with your page, they receive a notification, either via email or through a little icon next to your page name inside Facebook. If they're good at their job, they will go to the page to check out the activity and clear the notification. Nothing is more disappointing for a social media manager than thinking a fan interacted with a page and finding out it was a staff member instead.
3. You're bulking up your Facebook insights with meaningless engagement and skewing your demographic results. Wouldn't you rather know how fans are interacting with your page, who they are and what type of content excites and engages them? If you (and your other staff members) are driving up the "reach" and "talking about this" results with your own likes and comments, it will be harder to track those of your actual fans.

Instead you should:

1. Save the likes and comments for truly exciting and special announcements from your business page, or times when a personal note from the owner or staff are necessary & appropriate. That way your friends might actually see it and not tune it out. If you're a page admin, remember to change your page settings to allow you to post as yourself instead of as the page.
2. Interact with your customers and talk to them personally about Facebook: do they have it and oh by the way they can find you on Facebook!
3. Support your social media staff with the information & budget they need to make your page great: advertising budget, photos, information on your business and current specials & promotions, more photos, the names of your neighbors & partner businesses, and did I mention photos?

Ending the cycle of useless likes and comments and focusing instead on real ways to increase engagement will save you time and money, make Facebook the customer relationship tool you signed up for in the first place, and keep your social media team sane.

As usual, if you have any questions or comments please share them below, or find me on Twitter (@lpmikov).