I have over 3,200 “friends” on Facebook.
Of course, all of those aren’t really friends of mine.
But I do have some sort of personal connection to a surprising number of people on that list. I’m middle-aged and have lived in several different cities as an adult. I’ve known a lot of people over the years and have developed diverse interests. I have been teaching for over 20 years and have hundreds of former students among my Facebook friends.
And being a columnist makes me sort of a public figure, and I use my personal Facebook page as a public platform for the most part. Pretty much all of my posts to my timeline are public these days, which means the privacy is set so that they’re visible to Facebook users who aren’t already my friends.
But if people have friended me because they are interested in my public commentary, why have so few of those people accepted my invitation to “like” the Facebook page for this blog? As of this writing, the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page has 1,617 “likes”, but only 965 of those are from friends of mine.
Sure, there are lots of people — maybe a few hundred — who would have a reason to be connected to me on Facebook but who care nothing about this blog. I’m connected to some for specific reasons that have nothing to do with my writing. Some who don’t live in Savannah clearly have no interest in a blog like this one.
But what about the rest of those people, including the ones who friended me because I’m a columnist but aren’t following this blog, which is an extension in many ways of those columns?
I recently also launched, after a few years of frustration that no one else was doing what I envisioned, the Savannah-based music blog hissing lawns. I haven’t invited my entire Facebook friends list to like the hissing lawns Facebook page, but some who I know are interested in the local music scene have not connected with the page, despite an invitation and despite occasional reminders via my personal page.
Yes, some people don’t notice those invitations to like pages, even though they show up as individual notifications.
And I guess some people see it as a bother and imposition to expand their network of contacts.
But many of those people don’t seem to understand the power of the “social” in social media.
If a friend of yours is launching a new business, product, or service, that person is investing time, effort, and often money. Why wouldn’t a friend want to support that effort? Why wouldn’t someone genuinely interested in the page’s content not take the time to “like” it?
One simple “like” can show up in friends’ news feeds and lead others who don’t know the creator to like the page.
An accumulation of fans dramatically increases the odds that new posts will generate significant traffic and appear in other news feeds. Interactions with posts — again, simple “likes” — will draw even more attention.
I know from running these two blogs that increased Facebook activity leads directly to more page views. The only revenue from my blogs is from Google Adsense, but that small amount of revenue is directly proportional to traffic.
It seems obvious that Facebook pages representing for-profit product sales or services will also see more revenue if fans interact with them more.
As a columnist and blogger, I should add that the number of Facebook likes can matter in other ways. When I’m writing about a band or a business, I routinely check out the Facebook presence. If a band has been around forever and has relatively few likes, that says something about their ambition and their interaction with their fans.
Ditto for businesses. Some clearly don’t need Facebook to thrive, and some use other forms of social media more effectively. Still, the number of likes matters. Again, it’s commonsense that the number of likes is directly proportional to the sales generated through Facebook.
And of course, as a Facebook user, you can like a page and then ask that it not even show up in your feed from then on. You can support a friend or a worthy cause or a promising business just by taking a second to click like — and then you don’t even have to do anything else.
I don’t click like on every single request that I get, by the way. If it’s a page or product that I know nothing about and can’t imagine ever patronizing, I often ignore the request.
But if an actual friend is launching some sort of new venture, I’ll support it in a heartbeat. It’s puzzling that so many people, including some who are pretty good friends of mine, don’t see the reasons for being similarly supportive.
And if you’re afraid of exposing your profile publicly by liking pages on Facebook, then you probably shouldn’t be using Facebook at all.