There is a basic premise in Facebook marketing where more likes are better. Unfortunately, this is a false premise if you attain more likes and buy likes. We get it and we’ve been in your position before. You woke up yesterday and discovered that your competitor’s Facebook page has more likes than yours. So how do you quickly overcome this, on a tight budget?

Whatever you do, don’t buy likes for your food truck Facebook page. You may feel that your food truck’s page looks lame with only a few hundred likes while other trucks in your area have thousands. Don’t give into temptation and buy likes.

Don’t Buy Likes: How It Will Hurt Your Food Truck Business

If you have no idea why buying likes will hurt your food truck, we’ve put together a partial break-down:

  • Facebook Likes Engagement. Facebook uses the engagement your page generates to determine how interesting your content is and how many of your fans should see it. Having thousands of inactive, non-engaged likes will make you look bad and your posts will reach less people organically.
  • Buying Likes Is Bad For Trust. Today’s social media users are smart and aren’t fooled into believing big numbers. What will they think of you when they see that your page has 50 thousand fans, but your last post received only 3 likes?
  • You Need To Understand The Numbers. One of the great parts of building an honest fan base on Facebook is the amount of data you can find in Facebook Insights. How old are your customers? Where do they live? What other interests do they have? If you buy likes, this information will be skewed and almost useless.
  • You’ll Waste Money Advertising. Once your Facebook page is filled with purchased likes, every time you want to boost a post, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of money to deliver your ads to those fake users. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to filter them out.
  • It Will Waste Your Time, After you realize what a huge mistake it was to buy likes, you’ll have to spend a lot of time cleaning up your Facebook Page.

Learning How Engagement Can Convert Into Sales

While it may seem like a great fix, it’s only temporary. In time, you’ll notice the like numbers dropping off as Facebook tracks down fake accounts and deletes them. So let’s say you buy 1,000 likes to catch up to another food truck, but next week you notice you only have half of those likes you just bought because the network deleted fake accounts. You can’t buy real engagement that converts into sales from your service window. Always remember who you want to reach, and ask yourself if will they still love your menu tomorrow?

Buying likes doesn’t guarantee that more people will discover your food truck. You don’t line up at a food truck because there are a lot of people in line, you line up because hype is up, your friends and family are talking about it and you know it’ll be worth your time to jump in the queue. Just because a food truck has 5000 likes instead of 100 likes isn’t why most people track a food truck down. It’s because people have said good things about its menu which has the most impact on their decision.

If you want to see your sales increase through social media, put more effort into building up your community with good quality content and engaging with your community. Make sure the likes you have are truly interested in what you have to say. Plan the content you share ahead of schedule, use effective graphics and messaging to get the word out.

RELATED: Building Your Food Truck Blog’s Content Marketing Strategy

So Do You Really Need A Facebook Page?

The truth is, Facebook is a great marketing channel for food trucks and it can be extremely effective in building your brand. But it takes time and commitment like any other part of your food truck business. Having a Facebook page without having a social media strategy to attract new customers to your food truck is worthless. Even worse, it’s a waste of time. It’s like printing catering menus and then not handing them out.

Because of this, the simple answer is, yes. You do need a Facebook Page for your food truck. You will need likes, but never buy likes so you can properly engage them and convert them into paying customers.

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