Okay okay, so waxing lyrical is probably not going to endear me to too many people. Most of us hated Shakespeare in high school and those of us that didn’t are probably rolling their eyes!

The only defense I have is that I’m a father and as such, bad puns, dad-jokes and misappropriated 500 year old references are my birthright! (See what I did there?)

But lets get into the nitty gritty, LIKES! Everybody likes them (sorry, that wasn’t intentional), but the biggest problem is that they actually don’t do anything in a business sense – at least not in the way most people are using them.

They’re what most marketers call a vanity metric – it looks good, but it really doesn’t mean much in terms of sales and profit. Lets face it, if we’re spending money, or time on Facebook in business, then we MUST see a return on that investment.

Adding insult to injury is that in order to get your content seen by as many people as possible, you’ve actually got to spend money to do it these days. (Have you ever noticed how your content only gets seen organically by 15-20% of the people who’ve liked your page?)

To get it seen by everyone, you’ve got to boost the post and shell out some coin and in return you get likes, shares and comments on your post……but no sales, no profit.

Its frustrating isn’t it?

The reason behind this is that a boosted post is designed to reach an “Engagement Audience” – this is an audience that has been optimized by Facebook to be full of people who are most likely to Like, Comment and Share your content……..not necessarily take action that leads to sales or profit.

This is one of the most common frustrations I see day to day working with clients, they are boosting posts but aren’t getting sales and its because they don’t understand this key audience optimization by Facebook.

There is a solution however, but first it requires a shift in your strategic thinking. The likes, comments, shares aren’t the end goal, sales are – getting the engagement is just the first step along the road to getting the sales and building an audience that loves your product or service.

Facebook has provided us with one of the greatest marketing tools in history (fair warning, I say that A LOT and I mean it every single time).

We’ve all heard the cliche` “Actions speak louder than words” – on Facebook, actions are everything. By liking, commenting or sharing your post a person has taken an action that identifies them as an interested party – a potential customer for you.

This is a wonderful thing – it definitely beats mass marketing efforts to everybody and spending a ridiculous amount of money. Using that boost you’ve just had a whole bunch of people identify themselves as a potential client because of the way they interacted with your content!

That’s huge!

What is even bigger, is that through your ads manager, Facebook allows you to create a custom audience based off these actions so that you can then specifically target these potential clients with your ads.

So the boosted post that got likes, comments and shares but was ultimately frustrating because it didn’t generate sales – just became a vital asset in your marketing matrix. Its the first step in any good Facebook marketing funnel – it allows your potential clients, the people most interested in what you do or sell, to put their hand up and say “Hey! I’m interested!”

Now all you have to do, is put together an amazing offer and get it in front of them!

If you’d like to learn how to get more likes and turn your likes into profit, join John Hellaby on Friday night at 7.30pm AEST for a FREE webinar! Register at: http://webinar.fbmcharity.com.au/