What is The Difference Between Like and Follow on Facebook

I have decided to continue with my series of answering the most common questions users ask for different social media platforms.

Some of these may seem quite simple, but a lot of users are struggling to find the right answers that can help them have a more successful time spent on social media. 

So far, when it comes to Facebook, I have covered a couple of very interested queries:  

How To Change Your Facebook Page Name and Username

How to Make an Engaging Facebook Cover Video in 2020

How to Tag a Business on Facebook

All are having a good amount of success and people are finding them very valuable, so I have decided to continue creating content in that fashion. 

In today’s topic, we will be covering the main difference between a like and a follow on Facebook. 

Facebook Followers vs Likes

A lot of people confuse these 2, so I am going to help you differentiate more easily, and teach you to see what’s more important to you. 

A like is simply a person who has decided to become a fan of your page. All it takes them is to simply click the like button and they will become a fan. 

A follower is a person who is basically ‘subscribed’ to receive all of the news and updates that you post on your page. It takes an additional action for a ‘liker’ to become a follower. 

From this you can conclude that a follower is more valuable than just a fan but more on that later. 

What you need to understand is that these two are totally independent. A person can be a fan of your page, but decide to unfollow you and not receive any sort of updates from your page. This can happen for many reasons. 

It can also happen that someone chooses to follow your page and get notified when you post something, but also chooses not to be associated by becoming a fan of your page. 

As previously stated, a follower is more important but this may not be for the reason you are thinking.

The only thing you should be worried about when it comes to your Facebook page is engagement. And when people decide to follow your content, they are more likely to see it, therefore more likely to engage. 

However, don’t get the wrong idea. Just because someone is following you, that doesn’t mean they will necessarily engage. This is just the first step in you capturing their attention.

You should be primarily focused on creating valuable and thoughtful content. Number of followers or page fans just won’t matter if you can’t extract any value out of them. 

Don’t be sucked into thinking that 150k fan page is more valuable than 1k fan page. 

Now, after that sentence you might be thinking I am a lunatic. 

What would you rather take? A 1k page of engaging customers who are willing to pay a lot of money for your products or services.

A random 150k meme page where fans are only there for entertainment. 

Once you put things into perspective, you realize that only quality matters. Here’s a great guide from Buffer on increasing facebook page engagement

Let me know if you agree or disagree with my views on likes and follows on Facebook, as well as the importance of page engagement. 

If you are looking for some content for a different social media platforms, make sure you check out our Instagram guides on editing Instagram comments as well as how to untag yourself on Instagram