Here's why Facebook's Engagement Might Not Work for You Facebook's sponsored posts may get you likes, but does it really help your business?

If you run a business, then it is quite natural that Facebook is perhaps the first place you setup a page to promote it. Perhaps, the Facebook page may actually have been setup before the official website (or even the only platform) for fans to follow. It doesn't take too long to see, how desperately Facebook wants you to buy paid advertisements to push your content above others.

The trick seems often too tempting to resist. By keeping costs of paid promotional for your page or posts extremely low, everyone is tempted at one of time to promote their content actively. Yet somehow, this doesn't seem to work out in terms of actual profitability or engagement for your business – why's that?

Here are top four reasons why paid/sponsored posts on Facebook might not be the right idea for your business:

The likes you generate might be generated for like-farms

One of the infinite secretes the internet hides behind its shiny displays of content are click farms – where hundreds or thousands of individuals engage using sophisticated softwares that change their IP addresses among other variables to log in and out of thousands of accounts and basically spend their day liking, as well as, commenting on random pages that they see. While some shady pages uses these farms to instantly get 10,000+ likes overnight on their page, there have been reports of Facebook actually using the exact same protocol to increase your likes using the same method if you bought paid ads.

Are you really targeting those users that matter?

While your ad gives you very helpful options to target only users from a particular country and those that may have similar tastes, are you really? Some independent researcher have confirmed most dummy likes, and a vast majority of likes on virtually any page arise from random clicks or users that'll click like on basically anything and everything. That high number of likes probably isn't even close to the number of actual people interested in your content.

Engagement matters, not likes

What use are high amounts of likes if your engagement rate is extremely low? It's important to glance at the engagement rates of your pages regularly, because this number determines where all those likes actually evolved into. It's important you take one good look at the number and compare them to likes. What use are 10,000 likes if your engagement rate is less than 3%?

Facebook is just a stepping stone to your real website

Unless you actually sell products via Facebook, and if you do then you have another completely different ballgame to be worried about, your Facebook likes are literally worthless. Your posts may even go viral, shares crossing 6 digits and total likes run in millions, but it's all useless unless people actually adopt your goods & services. The priority should be getting users to engage more into you business, rather than just increase the number of likes and shares of your posts. Just remember, 10 active clients are better than 100 empty likes and shares on Facebook.

What's your experience with Facebook's paid promotional been like? Let us know in the comments o0n our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India