A big thanks goes out to the amazing QOT community as we cross 100,000 Facebook likes today. It has been a long journey to 100K likes, but the QOT Facebook page has been a popular way for our Facebook page fans to get our latest content and interact with it.
We delved into our Facebook Insights to see how long we took to get the 100,000 Facebook fans to like us. This chart shows how we picked up the likes from December 2012 (with nearly 10,000 Facebook fans/likes) to today when we cross this huge milestone.
There has been a renewed interest and a large increase in Facebook likes since early 2014, more so after QOT won the Blogadda award, as you can see by further Facebook insights data, that Likes increased recently. Once the sharing / likes cycle starts, it increases your likes exponentially.
Organic Facebook Likes
We have never purchased Facebook likes ever (also note that buying Facebook likes violates their terms of service and they will delete fake likes!). We did experiment with official Facebook advertising (those ads you see in the Facebook news feed sidebar) in early 2013 for a few months, and that did get us a few thousand likes. You can try more strategies for Facebook marketing, though Facebook sends less site traffic now.
I think the biggest factor to get Facebook likes has been putting up the Facebook Like box, a Facebook social plugin in the sidebar, which allows an easy way for users to like your page without leaving your blog.We recently removed it from all pages, except the front page to speed page load times.
Another important factor is the prominent Facebook button on the top right along with other social media icons (those icons are not images, but icon fonts!). You might have noted we also do not use social sharing widgets for Facebook like buttons for faster page speeds, and sharing buttons are actually made by pure CSS.
Facebook Newsfeed vs RSS
Is Facebook the best to receive all our latest articles? While we post all new article links on the Facebook page, it actually reaches only a few thousand people. This is because Facebook algorithms like Edgerank will filter updates to give you custom personalized popular content (and not clutter your Facebook news feed with thousands of pages you might have liked). This is unlike RSS feed or the Email newsletter, which reaches your RSS reader (we use Feedly) or email inbox positively and is the recommended way to get all our latest tips and never miss them (25,000 RSS readers can’t be wrong!).
Once again – A huge thanks to the amazing QOT community for liking, sharing and following us. We promise to continue sharing more great tips and tricks so you like us even more!