Being “Un-Liked” is not a nice experience on your personal Facebook Page, but when it happens on your Facebook Business Page – it can mean sales trouble ahead. The point of Social Media for Business is that you aim to get subtle (or sometimes direct) endorsement of your products or services in the form of positive reviews or Likes that are then magnified through the power of Social Media referral – so called, “positive word of mouth – on steroids”. But if you start to see Un-Likes, and you do not address it, the chances are that you may have something fundamentally wrong with your business. But how do you even know? Well the best place is through your Facebook Insights and in particular, the column that is labelled “Daily Negative Feedback from Users”.
Once you have set up a Facebook Business Page and have been posting for a while, Facebook is able to provide you with a host of useful information. In fact, most small business users who bother to look at their Graphically presented Facebook Page Insights would say “too much”, but one you have to keep your eye on is “Daily Negative Feedback from Users” only comes as a download. To locate this, log in to your Facebook Page and Click on the down arrow next to the Asterix, just underneath and to the right of your Cover Image. A drop down menu appear and you should chose “Insights”. Click this, choose to view last 28 days and you will get a download of information in the form of a complex Excel file.
The Insight file is enormous It says a lot to me about Facebook’s priorities that one set of data I think most important, is located on Column BZ of the spreadsheet. That is 78 columns to the right!
Looking down this column you can see how much your fans have disengaged from your Facebook Business Page – by day. If you have zero, well done! But most business will have some. And this column shows not only full “Un-Likes, but also Fans that have decided to hide your Facebook updates from their own feed or even reported you as spam. If potential customers hide your page updates for good, you have lost them in engagement terms even if they don’t “Unlike you”
The thing I really like about this column though is that you can track back to the particular day when you had a lot of Negative user feedback and figure out what triggered the Un-Like behavior. Usually, it means that you have been posting content that is irrelevant or worse, repulsive Spam to your potential customers.
But it is not always that obvious. I have just been looking at just such an indicator for a client. When I tracked back, it appeared that Fans had particularly disliked posts about the client’s runners in the London Marathon. What we thought was great content about how the company was supporting a very good charitable cause was just too much or boring on the day. While it is tempting just to say that the client’s fans were just an uncharitable bunch- it is more likely that the Fans were in London Marathon overload and their feed was just too full of repetitive Marathon information. Charity and Marathon Fatigue!
So this last story shows that even with the data, it is sometimes not that simple. Whatever Facebook or anyone else tells you. Data alone does not equal Insight.
