BEWARE OF FAKE FANS: Not the way to grow your Facebook Page

Everyone wants to be ‘POPULAR’, but looking popular and being popular are two entirely different things. Some companies want so desperately to appear to be popular that they have resorted to purchasing Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers. While this may seem to be the cheap and easy way to add Likes to your page, it’s pretty easy to track the unnatural growth patterns of these fake likes, as well as the limited page interaction which are the result of buying likes.

When we refer to fake likes on Facebook, we’re referring to external services that sell packages of likes from fake accounts or people without real intent by offering a certain number of likes for a flat fee. Fake like peddlers tempt Page admins with offers to “buy 5,000 likes!” or other similar schemes.

These fake likes are generated through sources like click farms, fake accounts and malware. Sadly, most companies have no idea that buying likes actually hurts them. Here are just a few ways fake likes affect your business:

EdgeRank: Facebook uses the engagement your page generates to understand how interesting your content is and how many of your fans should see your posts. Having thousands of inactive, non-engaged users will result in Facebook penalizing your organic posts.

Credibility: Users are smart and don’t get easily tricked by big numbers. What will they think of you seeing that your page has 6,000 fans but your last post received only 1 like?

Understanding: Facebook provides a huge amount of information about your fan base. How old are your ideal customers? Where do they live? What other interests do they have? All this precious, attainable information becomes useless when skewed buy bought likes.

Advertising: Once your page is overrun by fake likes, every time you want to boost a post through Facebook Ads, you’re going to end up wasting a lot of money to deliver your ads to those fake users.

Time: After you realize what a huge mistake you’ve made buying likes, you’ll have to spend an incredible amount of time cleaning up your Facebook Page.