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Facebook bans like-gating – Try these 5 Facebook like-gate alternatives instead

Have you heard the news? As of November 5, 2014, Facebook like-gates are dead. If you blinked, you probably missed it because it was buried at the bottom of their latest list of changes to their API and SDKs. The statement went something like this:

You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. This includes offering rewards, or gating apps or app content based on whether or not a person has liked a Page. It remains acceptable to incentivize people to login to your app, checkin at a place or enter a promotion on your app’s Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

Because the changes made to like-gates affects your Facebook marketing, I put together a list of Facebook like-gate alternatives to help you continue to grow your Facebook Page likes without like-gates.

Facebook bans like-gating. Try these 5 alternatives instead!

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What is like-gating or fan-gating?

If you use tools like Shortstack, Tabsite, or Heyo or other landing page alternatives to show different types of content to fans and non-fans on your Facebook Page, you were using a feature known as a like-gate (or a fan-gate).

Examples of like-gating

Some examples of like-gates include:

Liking a Facebook Page to enter a contest
Providing coupons or promo codes once someone likes your Facebook Page
Liking a Facebook Page in order to watch a video
Liking a Facebook Page to download a PDF or eBook

If you currently use like-gates on your Facebook Page, they will continue to work until November 5. After that date, if you still have them on your Facebook Page, people will be able to access the content without liking your page. No new landing pages will be allowed to use the like-gate feature.

Why Facebook banned like-gating

So why did Facebook ban like-gating? They explained their reasoning further down the article.

To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.

When you think about it, like-gating on Facebook Pages has been slowly dying. They were popular back in 2010, but we have gotten a lot smarter as marketers. When Facebook launched a Facebook Page redesign earlier this year, landing page tabs were also removed and then re-added at the last minute. For me, this signaled that Facebook was putting less of an emphasis on landing pages.

Why like-gates don’t matter

While like-gates helped grow your Facebook Page likes, they really didn’t matter. This was because a lot of Facebook Pages were not growing them the right way. Previously, when you used a like-gate to have someone like your Facebook Page to enter a contest, a lot of times you were not bringing in the right types of fans on your page. In most cases, people liked your page just so they could enter a contest or win a prize. They were not interested in the content your page was going to share. By eliminating these gimmicks, this should help improve your Facebook experience in the following ways:

Users will see more of the content they want to see in their news feed
Advertisers can use Facebook Ads to improve their targeting
Businesses can improve the focus of their Facebook Pages

Now that you know about changes to like-gates and how they will affect your Facebook marketing tactics, I wanted to share a list of Facebook like-gate alternatives to help you bring in more quality Facebook Page likes.

5 Facebook like-gate alternatives

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5 Ways to grow your business with Leadpages

If you are like most business owners, you struggle with picking the right tools for a project you are working on.

Sometimes there are too many choices, others times, you don’t know if a tool is any good.

As a result, you end up buying a lot of tools you won’t ever use and waste a lot of money in the process.

When I recently redesigned my blog, one of my goals was to spend less time building things for my business and more time growing my business.

That’s one of the reasons why I looked at using Here are five Leadpages examples.

5 Leadpages examples

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10 Reasons to use ShortStack for business

Are you looking for ways to make your Facebook Page more engaging for fans and to grow your presence on Facebook? One of the ways you can add value to your Facebook Page is by using Shortstack.

For those of you not familiar with Shortstack, it is a powerful third-party Facebook landing page tool that you can use to add all sorts of functionality to your Facebook Page.

Some of the ways that you can use Shortstack are for running contests, displaying your favorite Pinterest boards, and collecting email newsletter subscriptions.

There are just some of the reasons to use Shortstack.

I’ve put together a list of 10 reasons to use Shortstack to help grow your business.

10 reasons to use Shortstack

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5 Things to Promote with Facebook Promoted Posts

Facebook recently added a new feature called promoted posts, aimed at helping you reach more of your fans. While this means you can promote any of your Facebook posts, it is important to remember that every piece of content should not be promoted. Think of it as a tool to use for only your best content.

For business owners, it is very important to know what kinds of posts you should promote, because the more you post and overwhelm your customers, the more likely they are to unlike your page or hide it from their newsfeed. You wouldn’t want that, would you? That means lost revenue and lost opportunities to get more eyes on your content, not to mention it could lead to poor word of mouth marketing to other customers.

So what should you promote?

Ideally, you should be very selective about what you post. You also want to make sure that whatever you are posting about is something that is a result producing activity – meaning something that will get users to take an action. If you’re just sharing news that has already been written about across a number of other websites, running a promoted posts may not be ideal, because you most likely won’t get the “pop” that you were expecting from fans. Instead, focus on posts that will help your business reach its own goals.

Here are five different types of content that you should consider using Facebook promoted post for.

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5 types of status updates to build social engagement

This post doesn’t really apply to one single social network. In fact, you could apply it to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ (or even one of the other smaller social networks that you’ve joined). We’re talking about status updates.

Just being on the hottest social network doesn’t guarantee that you’ll instantly amass a large following. It also doesn’t matter how many fans, friends or followers you have. No, you need to be engaging. We’re not talking about going around and meeting every single person that you’re connected with (that would take a ridiculous amount of time). Instead, we’re talking about using the basics that all social networks are built around – the status update.

Every social network offers a variation of the status update. For Facebook users, it could be a quote, sharing an event, posting engaging photos, or simply using the questions app. Twitter users are a little more confined – 140 characters to be exact, yet the status update is still relevant to share links, break news, or even tweet a photo from your encounter with your favorite celebrity. For Pinterest users, the status update isn’t just the photo that you pin to your pinboards – that’s a good chuck of it. In addition, be sure you include keyword rich descriptions (there’s a nifty search feature as well).

So enough with the examples, right? Take me to the 5 types of status updates that you can post to help build your engagement levels!

Continue reading 5 types of status updates to build social engagement