To seriously understand the business value of building and engaging with your Facebook audience, knowing who likes your Page is a critical first step in connecting your audience and your customer list to gain incredibly powerful insights.
Do you have any idea who makes up the list of people who have Liked your brand or company’s Facebook Page? If you have never tried to figure it out, take a minute and go hunt down the full list of Facebook users who have Liked your Page.
Now that you’ve had a look, now you’re probably either stumped or you think you found the full list. If you believe you found the full list, take a closer look. What you will find is that Facebook doesn’t actually tell you everyone who has Liked your Page.
So what does Facebook tell you about your Page Likes? They give you a count of the number of Likes that your Page has received.
Is this an accurate number? Possibly, but you really don’t know.
Can the number be verified? No.
Instead you must trust that the number Facebook has provided is accurate. I have no reason to believe that the number is inaccurate, but it is always nice to be able to verify the accuracy of data, especially for a metric like this one.
Knowing the count of Likes that your Page has received is nice, but wouldn’t it be beneficial to know who has Liked your Page? These are individuals and other Pages who have connected on their own with your Page, so it is not like you are gaining access to information that the individual or Page is trying to hide. If that were the case, they would never have Liked your Page in the first place.
Facebook, however, is not hiding everyone who has Liked your Page. You can see a partial list of the Page Likes. If you go to the Likes section of Facebook Insights there is a small link that says See Likes.
If you click it, you may believe you have finally found the elusive list of people who have Liked your Page. Sadly, you would be wrong.
While it is true that you see a list, scroll to the bottom and you will come across a See More link. Click it. Click it again, and again. What you will find is that once you get to 500, you will no longer be able to see any more of the list.
Facebook seems to show you the 500 most recent people who have Liked your Page. The rest remain a mystery.
It may just be me, but it seems odd that I am kept in the dark about who has connected with my brand or company on Facebook.
If your service provider for email marketing only told you the details for some of your email list, I bet you would be looking to take your business somewhere else. If Twitter only gave you a sample of the Followers that you had, I bet you would question the authenticity of your follower count. Facebook, however, can get away without telling you who has Liked your Page.
We have been unable to determine why Facebook only shows you the 500 most recent people who have Liked your Page, but it sure would be interesting to understand from the source why that decision was made. Showing 500 would seem to indicate that it is not a privacy issue. If not for privacy concerns, what is the reason that Page admins are restricted from seeing the individuals who took action to connect with the brand or company Page?
This may not seem like a big deal to some, but for anyone who is seriously trying to understand the business value of building and engaging with your Facebook audience, having this information is critical. It is a first step in connecting your Facebook audience and your customer list which results in incredibly powerful insights into the impact that your social media efforts have on revenue generation.