Last year I closed my original Facebook page for this website. It was relatively successful when you consider how meaningless this website is. The page had 1300 Facebook followers and the overall trend was an increasing follower count. But I noticed a few things—nothing terrible or overly negative—and decided to close the page down and start again. With the new Scarebear Rocks Facebook page comes new rules and expectations. It’s a social experiment I’ve decided to run on a social network.
Ground breaking right?!
So … what happens if you only promote your Facebook page on your own site/s and refuse to promote the page or any individual posts through Facebook itself?
At the time of writing, my new account has seven—yes, 7—page followers. I’m pretty sure all but two of those came directly through my personal Facebook friends. They most likely did this for a few reasons.
- I told them that I would only post guitar content through my page and not through my personal Facebook page—to save my non-guitarist friends from my boring guitar posts.
- They felt sorry for my new Facebook page having no followers.
- They like the things I post about as Scarebear.
That last one is a bold assumption. It makes me feel better to think that there is any possibility of this being true.
I know one of my other page followers saw me mention my Facebook page on Twitter—which is my preferred social network. Don’t tell Facebook.
One page follower is a true Facebook follower. He somehow saw a post I’d made in his Facebook feed and seemingly thought “This looks like I may be interested in it”. To be honest, I found that amazing. That one new follower meant more to me than about 1250 of the previous followers I’d had. Why?
Most of my original Facebook followers were bought.
My previous web host gave me $50 Facebook advertising credit a few years back and I used it to promote my Facebook page. It’s what people do. It seemed fair enough. And if you’re building a potentially profitable brand, it makes absolute sense to do so. But that’s not my brand. I don’t currently make any money from this Blog.
I honestly continue to write each post on this site with the assumption that I’m the only person who will read it from start to end. So it made little sense in the end for me to have 1300 followers who only liked my page because they saw an ad with an amazing image—I do take pretty damn good guitar photographs at times—and a page description that led them to believe I’m bigger than I really was.
That perception was another of the things I’d noticed with my first Facebook page. People started asking questions and making statements that implied I’m some kind of professional guitarist, journalist or worse … both. These people had clearly never been to this website or read my own description of myself.
If I didn’t have that free credit, there was no way I was spending $50 on Facebook advertising. I’m not some rich celebrity like Tom Arnold or something. I’m a guy with a day job about as far removed from the guitar world as it gets. So if I’m going to have any Facebook following, it’s going to be my real-world friends or people I meet online through other social networks and/or this very website.
The website my Facebook page—and other social media accounts to be honest—is supposed to support.
I can’t have more people following me on Facebook than I have here. That makes very little sense to me. I’m trying to build my own content on my own website. So it’s time to start getting better at that. Who knows … maybe with that I can get my Facebook followers in the double figures.
#lifegoals