Facebook FanPage Posts Not Getting Exposure? Try Unliking Campaigns

One problem social media marketers face is how to get their messages to show to their Facebook FanPage Fans without having to spend money.  Chances are that if you’re message is not getting exposure, it’s because your “FanPage Fans” aren’t actually “Fans”.  To help reverse this trend and start to try and get more exposure, you may want to try Facebook Unliking campaigns.  (Unliking campaigns are a term I have been using internally with my own company and my clients for years.  Not sure if it is a real one or not.)

This post will go over what Unliking campaigns are, a few ways to do them and how they can possibly help you to gain more exposure when trying to get an active Facebook FanPage.   (BTW, I can easily see this turning into a service or business model for a bunch of social media marketing agencies.  If you do offer it, don’t forget to source where you found out about FanPage unliking services.  #ShamelessPlug). 

How to do Unliking Campaigns on Facebook.

If you’re having problems delivering content to your Facebook fans, start with this post on what to stop doing with your Facebook FanPages now, then read the post below.

The problem may not be the content you’re sharing, the times you are posting or the people you’re tagging and calling out.  The problem could be your actual fans.  If the problem is that your fans have selected to block your content, are not real fans or were invited by friends who work for your company, you have two options to recover your real fan base.

You can either start from scratch with a new page or try a Facebook FanPage Unliking campaign.

Unliking campaigns are like link removal campaigns.  The goal is to get people that are not relevant or interested in your content to unlike your Facebook FanPage.  Facebook Unliking campaigns can be a PR nightmare and offend people if done wrong; so you have to be careful.  Below are a few ways to do an Unliking campaign on Facebook as well as some things to make sure you do before you send your first unlike request.

What to Remember Before Starting an Unliking Campaign on Facebook.

• Always customize your messages to the recipient so that they are only for the recipient and it makes sense to unlike your FanPage
• Don’t be mean, rude or blame the person for hurting your company, deliverability or FanPage
• Try to make the person receiving the message think it is a good idea to unlike your FanPage, or make them realize they should unlike it without asking them to click unlike

Ways to Run a Facebook FanPage Unlike Campaign

The first thing to do with a Facebook Unlike campaign is to identify who is and who is not a real fan.  If non real fans are getting your content, they will ignore it which means your deliverability is dropping with a lack of engagement signals.  That is why it is important to determine and find who your real fans are.  Here are some of the things I would recommend you do to identify who your non-fans are before you start your Facebook Unliking campaign.

Create a List of Active Fans

Creating a list of active fans is an awesome way to dwindle down the list of people.  Look through your last few months or year and create a list of who comments, who shares and who likes your content.   Then go a step further and when you see someone shared something, look at the share and see if others engaged with it.  You can then invite those people to become a fan.  By bringing the people who comment when your content is shared, you build a more active following that sends relevance signals and interesting content signals back to Facebook.  By having your active fans in a list, you can now look for the inactive or fake fans and start running requests to unlike your FanPage.

Look Through and Find Fake Fans

To find fake fans, start going through your total fans and exclude anyone on your sheet.  You are probably groaning if you have thousands of them. It’s the same thing for SEOs that are working on backlink takedown requests where there could be hundreds of thousands of links.  It sucks, but you have to do it.

Look for fans that like tons of pages, like pages not relevant to yours and also who work for companies and have interests or job titles that have nothing to do with your company or your FanPage.  You can also look for accounts that like pages but write no content, share no content and clearly have fake profiles and profile pictures.

(Side note:  While you’re looking through, add notes next to each person’s name about the things they comment on, the things they like and posts from their timelines so you can customize everything when you send an unlike my FanPage request.)

Create a List of Incentivized Likes

The last thing to do is to look at time frames where you may have done giveaways and held contests where someone had to like your page to enter.  By incentivizing people to like your page, they might not be real fans.  You should go through and put these people into a separate list.  If they constantly like pages to enter contests, set up fake profiles to like pages and leave random comments on entries (you can tell by looking at their comments on other FanPages, especially if they are only on contest entries), they probably aren’t fans and you’ll need to try and get a hold of them to remove the likes.

Now that you have your groups of who to reach, it’s time to figure out how to reach them.  Below are a few possible ways to do Unlike requests on Facebook.  Please remember to customize everything and be nice.  You don’t want people blasting and bashing you instead of clicking unlike and moving on.

How to do a Facebook FanPage Unlike Request.

A Direct Request to Unlike Your FanPage

This is the most basic and easiest way to reduce or remove fake likes on a Facebook FanPage.  You simply draft an unlike my FanPage message and then send to everyone individually that is definitely not a real Fan.  This is unfortunately also one that can cause a ton of problems if done wrong.

You can piss off a lot of people and create a PR nightmare.  You can get reported for spamming on Facebook and lose your page or account and you can offend people by not customizing it and giving them a reason that would make sense to unlike your FanPage.

Try to use what you know from your spreadsheet above to show what they probably aren’t interested in your content or company.  Then talk about your page and how you don’t think it is content that they would like.  Make sure to mention you love having them as a fan, but want to make sure that they aren’t getting bombarded with content that they wouldn’t like.  You can also go a step further and let them know that by having them as a like on your FanPage, it reduces your ability to reach the people who want your content and may be hurting your company.  This can be tricky though and cause you headaches so be careful.

If You or Your Company Used a Buy Facebook Likes Service

This one is a pain, but depending on the service can be a quick and easy fix.  Find the service that your company or consultant used and ask them to undo their work.  You could offer them money to do the unlikes or possibly do a threat to report them and their fans to Facebook (but this could easily backfire on you as well).  It’s like doing negative SEO with backlinks to someone’s site.

By finding the person in charge of building the crap links or that owns the link or site network, you can ask them to help remove the bad links or Facebook FanPage likes.  If the person that did the fake likes is reasonable, they may reverse it for you or charge you a fee to remove them.  It’s worth trying since it is a quick and easy way to remove fake FanPage likes.

Email Your Upcoming Content

This one can be a great option if done the right way.  You send a message to the Fan and tell them about upcoming content for the next year.  Then ask them what they think of it and if this is the type of content that they would like to see when they log into Facebook.  If you know they never comment or like this type of content, you can provide a way to not have to see it by Unliking your FanPage.  It provides them with a solution and a better user experience on Facebook so it is a win win for you, them and Facebook.

You can try to mention things like “we don’t want you to have content in your feed that isn’t interesting which is why we are asking…” or something that helps to make it seem like a value add to the user.  By helping to make it the user’s idea and a benefit to them, you can let them know it only takes a second and they will no longer see posts that aren’t interesting to them in their feed so that they can have a better Facebook experience when they log in.

By helping to reduce the amount of people who aren’t real fans, don’t care about your content or liked your page because a co-worker asked them to, you can create a more relevant fan base for your FanPage.  By having the more relevant fan, you may have a better chance at getting your content in front of the right people and getting likes, shares and comments.  These in turn can sometimes send signals to make the Facebook algorithm happy and show your content to more people giving you more exposure and helping to solve your problem with getting your message and content out on Facebook.

Image purchased from DepositPhotos by L_amica.