There are several ways to boost likes on social media. You can promote a post via a paid advertising campaign, or you can focus on growing your page through organic reach. Either way, getting more likes is crucial if you want your business to grow on social media. Discover six reasons why social media likes are vital for your business. 

1. Engagement Plays a Role in Social Media Algorithms

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram look at like counts to determine how likely it is for a reader to find a particular post interesting. Facebook’s mission, and that goes for every other social media platform as well, is to keep users on the site. They don’t want users to go off and do something else, because they lose out on ad revenue. The longer someone stays on Facebook, the more ads they will end up viewing and clicking on.

To keep users on the site, Facebook tries to show them content they would find interesting. One of the ways it determines whether a post is interesting or not is by looking at like counts. If a post only attracted a few likes out of hundreds of impressions, it’s probably not very interesting, so Facebook will start showing that post less. It doesn’t want to show boring posts to users.

If a post gets hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of likes, on the other hand, Facebook assumes that post will be interesting to others as well. As such, it prioritizes it in people’s newsfeeds.

Not only that, but if your profile page consistently publishes content that gets massive amounts of likes, social media platforms like Instagram will start recommending that others follow you. Your profile might appear in the suggested or discover sections of the particular social media platform you are using.

2. Engagement Can Help With Brand Awareness

Social media engagement is also important for brand awareness. As I mentioned in the previous section, if you get consistently high engagement rates, people will find you more via the discover or search sections of social media platforms.

Also, when your posts get a lot of likes, users will start sharing them. The more interesting your posts are, and the more people like them, the more people will share them. That will help get your brand out there and increase brand exposure for free.

3. Likes Are Positive Social Proof

Likes act as social proof. Think about it. If someone lands on your page, and your posts only have 3-5 likes each, what will they think about your business? Most people will think that your posts are uninteresting or that you don’t have much to offer, which is why nobody is engaging with your posts. It might sound a bit harsh, but that’s the truth. Even if they don’t think that explicitly, it’s still the impression many people will get.

On the other hand, if someone lands on your page and all of your posts have hundreds of likes and comments, it will draw their interest. They will want to see what the entire fuss is about and why so many people are attracted to your page and find it worth their time to like or comment.

Social proof is extremely important on social media. The entire point of social media is for people to keep up with friends and family and find interesting content that other people recommended and shared.

That means you need to get your foot in the door, so to speak, to start attracting the first batch of likes. Once you start getting a nice amount of likes, your page will experience a snowball effect of your likes leading to additional likes, which build social proof and help you get even more likes.

However, it’s not just about the likes. Many potential customers will be researching your company or business and land on your social media page, either through Google, a direct social media search, or by finding your profile links through your site. If they see that your page struggles to get a decent amount of likes, many will be turned off.

They might become suspicious that you can’t seem to attract engagement or that nobody is liking your posts. Even if they are not suspicious, there’s just not enough information for them to base their decision on.

However, if they see that a lot of people have liked your page or posts, they will feel more comfortable purchasing from you.

Did you know that 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much as a recommendation from a friend or family member? Think of likes on your social media posts as votes attesting to your quality of service, customer support, brand integrity, and trustworthiness. The more votes you get, the more likely people are to purchase from you. It’s like local backlinks and citations; the more quality citations you have, the better.

4. Likes Can Help You Go Viral and Expand Your Reach

The dream of many social media marketers and content creators is to hit that sweet spot one day and go viral. You don’t plan when you go viral; it just happens. Sometimes, it can take months or years of publishing quality content until you publish a single:

• Story
• Meme
• Infographic
• Video

Or any other post that catches people’s attention and causes you to go viral. However, while you can’t plan on going viral, there is something you can do to make it more likely: get more likes.

The reality is that even if you publish viral-worthy content, people need to be able to find and share that content in the first place to start the viral sharing effect that comes after. The more likes you have, the better chances you have of someone finding and sharing your post.

You don’t have to go viral to be successful on social media. You can get fantastic results by simply growing your reach organically, step-by-step. However, if you do manage to go viral, that would dramatically change the game and allow you to get a lot of free traffic and sales.

5. Constant Engagement Keeps Your Community Fresh

Without constant engagement, your social media community will die out. You need continuous engagement if you want to keep attracting new people and get your existing fans to keep sharing and engaging with your content.

You also need continuous growth. If the same 10 people are always liking and commenting on your posts, you will have a harder time keeping up the momentum. To drive momentum, focus on getting new likes and engagement from new people.

6. Constant Engagement Can Help Attract Returning Customers

Finally, constant engagement helps you attract repeat customers. If your momentum dies down and people stop liking and commenting on your posts, Facebook and other social media platforms will stop showing them as often to your existing customers.

Did you know that people only see around 15 percent of posts shared by friends, family, and pages they follow on Facebook? The more friends people have on Facebook, the less likely it is for them to see a post you shared. However, if they consistently like your posts, Facebook will show them your posts more often.

It’s the same with Instagram. If you consistently like posts shared by a brand or a particular person. Instagram will start prioritizing posts from that brand or person and show them to you at the top of your news feed. It goes back to what I explained before — social media platforms want to keep users on their site, so they show them posts they think they will like.

The social media platforms also hope that by constantly showing users posts from people they interact with often at the top of their news feeds, people will open the app more often and more frequently throughout the day.

That is why it is not enough to get more followers. You need to get your followers to engage with your page and posts as well. As an aside, that’s why it is almost always a bad idea to buy followers or to get followers who aren’t interested in your niche. While it might inflate your follower count, it won’t help you increase engagement. It is a bad look when you have a lot of followers and very little engagement, as it will show that you bought followers.

Wrapping it Up

So, there you have it: six reasons why you need to get social media likes on your posts and tweets. If you are having trouble with organic growth at the beginning, you can consider setting up a paid campaign. For example, Facebook allows you to set up an advertising campaign with the objective of getting likes.

Organic growth is always better, as it allows you to grow at a lower cost to you, thus increasing your bottom line. Some ways to get more organic likes are to publish more often, publish more quality content, post live videos on Facebook, and post memes and GIFs when appropriate. Conduct some A/B split tests to figure out which content gets the most likes.