You have your business. You have your website. You feel like you are ready to launch your social networks. You choose Facebook and you open your Fan Page. So far, so good: nothing out of the ordinary. You want to have plenty of fans to drive to your website, but you just opened your business page on Facebook and your like counter is at zero. Rest assured, we have all been there. Building and retaining a fan base is a long process. If you are here to look for a quick fix to increase your likes artificially, this article is not for you. It would not be ethical for us to suggest to our clients that they purchase likes in order to lie to their audiences. What’s more, when buying likes, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Together, we will see why in this article. But first, let’s understand why some companies want to buy likes.
Buying Likes – Misconceptions
Faster Growth
We all want to grow quickly. Especially when we are a small company that has just launched: given that nobody knows our brand, we believe that nobody will “like” us. Indeed, what benefit is there in publishing content for just 3 people? We understand that it is tempting for some to have 1000 likes for 5 CHF*, but when it comes to 1000 false likes, the game is not worth the candle.
Appearing Popular
The main argument used by the sites that purchase fake likes is: “a restaurant with diners has to be better than an empty restaurant.” We fully understand the thinking behind this idea, but it is a very short-term strategy that creates a huge amount of inconvenience in the future. Also, the diners who go to a restaurant to eat something are real people, with a real desire to eat at that restaurant. If we push the analogy further, buying fake Facebook likes is like placing fake diners in the restaurant to attract people. Ridiculous? Not as much as buying fake Facebook fans.
Little Investments
Some sites can guarantee 1000 likes for CHF 5 (0.02 CHF per like), while through Facebook advertising, one like can cost you 0.20 CHF (10x more expensive). It seems that purchasing fake likes is far more cost-effective… Until we reflect further.
Why Buying Facebook Like Is a Very (Very) Bad Idea?
EdgeRank
Facebook has developed an algorithm that works to determine whether or not the content that you publish is “interesting” to audiences. Interesting content is made more visible to audiences. If your first fans (between 6% and 10%) do not like, comment or share your content, EdgeRank determines that your content is uninteresting and your content will not reach fans even if they have liked your page.
Credibility
As users interact more and more with Facebook, they become familiar with how some pages use fake likes to appear more legitimate and popular than they actually are. Savvy users will not fall for this trick, and with just a few likes per each post, you will not be able to impress anyone.
Analysis
With the rich data that users generate, Facebook allows you to explore precise insights into your fans: what age are they? Are they men or women? Where do they live? Etc. This data is critical to publishing targeted content to your fans. With fake likes, you can say goodbye to any relevant analysis.
Publicity
As you are not able to differentiate between your fake and real fans, the day you want to boost a post, you will be advertising your posts to robots (the extras in the restaurant) who do nothing with your publications. In other words, you are simply throwing money down the drain.
Return on Investment
One of the key reasons that companies venture onto Facebook is to acquire new customers. Unfortunately, your one million fake fans on Facebook will never bring you anything in terms of turnover.
Temps
Once you discover that buying the likes was a very bad idea you will lose a lot of time cleaning your fan base, especially if you decide not to start anew and create a new page..
Conclusion
Without excusing the practice, we can fully understand what can push companies to buy fake likes. However, we hope that after reading our article, we have erased any desire on your part… Especially if you have a long-term vision of your company image. Social networks are ultimately not so different from real life: better to have 10 friends who love you for what you are than 1000 “friends” who love you for what you are not.
