Why You Shouldn’t Buy Facebook Fans or Likes
You’ve probably seen these too-good-to-be-true offers, the ones that tell us “we’ll get you 10,000 fans in one week!” or “delivering 5,000 likes in a matter of days!” For some reason the bigger-is-better attitude hasn’t died in the social media realm.
Just this week I was working with a client who forwarded me an offer for 2,500 Facebook likes for ‘only’ $5,000. What a deal! But wait, is it? If you’re even considering the idea of buying likes, let’s consider two questions first:
1) Are these people?
Sounds like a funny question, but seriously, ask yourself, are these REAL, ACTUAL people? Or are they accounts set up in a multitude of names with no real person behind them?
The rise of Like Farms is something that Facebook continues to deal with, just in the way that Google has altered their algorithm numerous times to deal with link farms. Large groups of people or accounts set up as people like various pages in exchange for money or reciprocal likes. This can go round and round to build a large number of fans to a page.
Let’s try to assume the best — we’ll say, for the sake of argument, that these are real live people with Facebook accounts. Okay, moving on.
2) Who are these people?
We’ve decided to assume the best and that these are real people. But now, who are they? Do they have any interest in what you have to offer? If everybody in your family was forced to like your Facebook page, do you think that would help increase your sales? Sure, there would be that fleeting status update of ‘Joe liked (YOUR PAGE NAME HERE).’ Then what? Odds are anything you post will be ignored if Joe isn’t actually interested. In fact, he could even hide your notifications.
Now, in this scenario, say Joe made a small stipend for this like. How many pages do you think Joe likes? After that initial like, how many do you think he actually follows or cares about?
Odds are these people are not in your target market, and they may never be potential customers.
You want people who want to hear from you.
They might not want to hear from you constantly, but they actually care about what you have to offer, are interesting in buying from you, enjoy your tips and tricks or your fabulous sense of humor. Whatever it is, they have opted in. Social media is a form of in-bound marketing, where people choose to hear from you. That choice is important!
Bigger isn’t always better. And more likes doesn’t equate to a better page.
You know that client I mentioned earlier? I decided to check out one of these pages that this particular competitor said he had gotten 11,000+ likes for, and the funny thing is, there wasn’t that much interaction. The most popular update had 4 likes, and no comments. There were a few updates that had a couple comments. Now it’s hard to say what other marketing they’re doing, or how many people come from that page, but it was obvious that while there was a large number of people on that page, not many were ‘talking about this’, Facebook’s public measure of the buzz around the updates. Do these fans make for a big number? Yes! And if that’s all you’re after, buying fans might work for you. But I’m willing to guess you’re on Facebook to grow your brand, generate leads and increase sales. If you run a non-profit, it’s very much the same — you’re looking to increase awareness, engage volunteers, and inform and woo donors. More likes doesn’t necessarily mean more interaction, more leads, or more money.
Enough already! We get it. Do likes matter at all, then?
Yes! Definitely. Increasing the number of people who really are interested in what you have to offer matters greatly. Increasing real fans can exponentially increase leads and sales. It goes back to reaching your people, the ones who will share your content, recommend your service or product, and buy from you. Not every Facebook fan is going to do that, and that’s okay. But having 5,000 fans who never check in with you, never visit your page, and don’t actually, truly ‘Like’ you is not worth your time or money.
There are a number of ways to better engage your current fan base, and to naturally grow your number of likes. More on that in future blog posts! Meanwhile, if you get one of these Facebook like offers, it’s best to stick to the old adage, ‘if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.’
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Leigh Pekara
Thanks for posting this useful information, I hadn’t really thought of it from this perspective.
Becky Larsen
Good post–so true, you want quality engaged fans.
Kenny Novak
Engaged fans are always the more important kind of fans but you rarely see people joining a lonely account. Having an account with large numbers of fans and likes can entice people to follow along and become engaged, I’ve always found that buying Facebook likes is the best route.
Amber Wallace
This is an interesting point. If you’re not expecting any engagement from these likes, but are really in it for the numbers, then buying makes sense. I agree with that.
But I’m curious if you’re theory is correct — would having more fans increase the odds that someone else would click Like? If so, how does that relate to content? And what is the minimum — 100 fans, or 500 fans?
Who wants to run some tests?!
sathya
Well this is good actually. Got some idea while reading this. Thank you for sharing this.
Let
Buying Facebook Fans is best used when you start to have you own Fb page. I used to promote my page and so other would like my page as well. I order likes from http://www.bestsocialprovider.biz/ and deliver it on time, hassle free transaction and very nice support. For those who are want to own a page and get a lot of attention you can try buyying FB fans, they are REAL people, all you have to do is to engage to them and show that you are not a robot. But please be aware that there’s a lot of seller that give bots 🙂
Indigo Social
Buying social media followers sometimes help people to present themselves as an authortiy figure so I think when starting social media marketing couple thousands fans definetely will give the boost those people. But after all of course getting real and hard core fans will help to make them sales and business.