Can you remember what life was like before Facebook?
I resisted signing up for so long. “Are you on Facebook?” people would ask. “No quite happy not to be thanks.” Then it got to the point some friends wouldn’t even check their emails because “I only use Facebook now.” I finally got sucked in because I’d met a whole bunch of fun people on a tour bus around Europe & someone suggested we make a Facebook group to stay in touch & share photos. That was is I was on Facebook.
Skip ahead seven years & I’m still on Facebook. A few times I’ve thought ‘nahh it’s time to shut it down’ it’s such a waste of time & I’m not liking the kind of energy exchanges on there. However there is some really good stuff to read & it is a great way to keep up with international friends. Now I’ve built my business page I get a lot of joy posting my daily musing & interacting with like-minded Soul’s.
When I first started my Seren Holistic Lifestyles FB page I was a bit obsessed with the number of ‘likes’ I had. I’d look at other people’s pages & they would have hundreds of ‘likers.’ I’m so passionate about my work I really wanted lots and lots of people to be paying attention & following me too. Please let me be part of the cool kid gang.
In the Bright Eyed & Blog Hearted course FB group, getting likes was a hot topic. A lot of group members with business pages were chasing a ‘milestone like’ number. Posts asking “how do I reach 500 likes by Friday?” were quite common. Members shared their tricks to getting themselves out there & building numbers. Some were great marketing tools especially for those building businesses with paid for services.
It did however all seem like a lot of hard work. Spending a large amount of time trawling through Facebook liking & commenting on other pages to ‘get your name out there.’ For what a number? At the time that number was like gold to me. I so wanted to play in the big leagues of ‘like numbers.’ How awesome would it be to have engaging conversations happening on my page with lots of comments & page hits? This is how success is measured right with how many people follow you on FB? Well thankfully NOW I figured this out to be a BIG FAT NO.
However there were more lessons to be learned before I got there…
For a person obsessing about a rising number if someone ‘unliked’ my page it was a total disaster. Who was it? Was it a friend? Why did they leave? I would actually look through the likers list to see who was missing. What a nutter! (I found out later that unlikes can happen when people shut down their FB accounts so they naturally disappear from like numbers) I’d then try to get my like number back up by inviting friends to my page. Of course they would hit ‘like’ as they are my friends. However would these friends actually engage on my page?
All this crazy behavior was actually slowing down my progress. I was strangling the flow & my intent wasn’t pure, it was all about numbers. The energy was all wrong I finally realised. It was more an ego, head based want to have a large number of likers. Who says the pages with thousands of likers are actually engaging every single one of them? I’m sure there are pages out there that do or the admin team might have thousands of friends they’ve just invited to ‘like my page.’ I now believe firmly in quality over quantity. Numbers don’t matter.
I now get it.
My community of followers is small, 248 at the time of writing. Once I crossed the 200 like mark I definitely checked out from checking in on my like stats. The number has slowly grown from there, naturally & organically. The right followers will find me when they are ready.
There is a good amount of hard work I put into my page because I ‘want to’ for me’, not for getting more likers. I show up five days a week, post my stuff by speaking from the heart, no pushing or pulling. And you know what it works. I have regular followers who leave comments & engage with my posts. This feels good. I trust that the right people are getting the messages they need.
When people unlike my page it really isn’t a big deal anymore. I fully believe they got what they needed from the time they spent (if any) reading my posts. My message may not be aligned with them or their energy with mine anymore. They may not find what they were searching for or it may just be too woo woo 😉 This is all okay. Success is not to be measured by a number on Facebook. Success is how I feel about myself & how much I enjoy getting a kick out of what I do.
Have Facebook numbers sent you a bit loopy round the bend? I’d love to hear your stories, feel free to share in the comments below.
