Please, dont ask your friends to like your fanpage.

Lately they are bombarding you with invitations to become a fan of your friends' pages. Well I recommend not to replicate this strategy to get likes.

I came up with the idea to this post by watching how my Facebook friends launched their new pages. I am sure that you also receive one or more of these invitations at least every week.

Do not worry. This is not a post on the I feel upset plan but rather to raise awareness that performing these actions can be a shot in the foot. For various reasons, I tell you:

1. In few cases it is a target audience related to your subject
You may by courtesy a lot of your contacts like your page. Although in the short term you are fulfilling the goal that you have set (or imposed the client), in the medium and long term you are hurting.

In rare cases a person is really interested in your fanpage. What happen? When a person gives you the like it becomes part of your audience, but doesnt mean that is going to be a valuable part of that audience..

To see them does not mean that they interact with it and here is just the problem. The organic reach will be affected in a negative way because on average they will generate less engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares, etc. This affects the famous Edge Rank of Facebook so instead of adding points you are getting them. What interests you is to reach people who really like the theme because it increases the probability that interact with your publications is oxygen in Facebook if you have no budget to invest in Facebook Ads.

2. It hurts you when create campaigns with Facebook Ads
Speaking of the subject. Your Facebook Ads will be affected, albeit indirectly. Lets say you want to analyze your existing community for a more accurate targeting in the campaign. Typically you can draw statistics through the Facebook audience insights. The bad thing is that in this case you will have a test that will give you erroneous conclusions based on the profile of your Facebook friends that have given me like your page following the invitation.

Now that the party with the IDs is over, the most powerful weapons are the targeting of interests and data about the profiles of your community on Facebook. Especially for the second you need an organic mass that is really attached to your content. Everything else is to fool yourself and / or inflate the number of fans.