Should You Buy Cheap Likes on Facebook?
Should You Buy Cheap Likes on Facebook?Can we talk about the big elephant in the room here? If you’ve been around social media marketing at all for the last few years, you know that there are new strategies emerging every day about how to gain traction on social media. The problem is that in every industry, there are the sleazy used car salespeople who will ruin it for the rest and give the industry a bad name. Sadly, in the world of social media marketing, there are LOTS of slimy used car salespeople who use tactics that are not above board.
Periodically, we come across situations where clients have paid or decide to pay for a TON of followers for cheap. This seems like a win/win for the client, right? Low cost, lost of followers… I’ll preface my response with the concept that you get what you pay for. And, I believe that’s the case in situations like these. I know it seems great that you can get tons of followers to your page for cheap, but these come with an even bigger price that you may not realize at first.
Why You Should Think First Before Buying Cheap Followers on Facebook
Quality
The problem with buying a ton of cheap followers on Facebook is that these are often fake accounts. Fake accounts do a ton to screw with your overall success on social media for a number of reasons. These are helpful for one number only: your first glance number of followers IF someone is even paying attention to that. That’s it. And frankly, that’s a vanity number in the world of digital marketing.
Metrics
Okay, so you’ve purchased a ton of fake likes to your Facebook page, but since they’re all fake, they won’t engage back. Makes sense right? Compare this with gaining a REAL Facebook user who will actually engage with your content organically. The reality is that since your ratio of fake accounts to real accounts is so skewed now, you can’t accurately measure how well any of your organic content performs.
Organic Reach
Since you have majority fake accounts, your future organic posts will continue to perform low, if not lower than before. The algorithm already shows your content to a low percentage of overall followers, so when they show it to these fake accounts and they don’t engage, that sends signals to the algorithm that that post is poor performing, and so it won’t be shown to others as much. What does this mean? Ultimately, it means that you’ll need to pay to reach the people you want, and you’ve effectively hurt your chances at getting any traction organically on your profile.
Longterm Authority
If your posts aren’t getting out to a bunch of people organically, then you are in a situation where you have to always pay to play. If you’re willing to do that, then maybe this whole discussion is a Moo Point (as Joey from friends says) and it’s a cow’s opinion. However, if you ever want to get organic, longterm loyalty from users, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to consider starting over. I like to compare this to investing in SEO vs. Google Adwords. SEO is a longterm strategy of building authority and recognition with Google, and as a result, they’ll start to rank you higher and higher on search terms. The other approach to showing first in search results is to pay to get there through Google Adwords. While this is a great way to be seen on the first page, it comes with a price and when you stop paying, you stop ranking. It’s similar with adding fake followers to your Facebook page, only once you add them, you’ve already skewed your organic rank-ability so much that you’d have to try to remove the fake followers before you could recover that authority to rank with the algorithm.
Risky
Tactics like buying fake followers are strategies that are likely to get you flagged by Facebook. They’re pretty smart over there and they will figure out that your page is full of spam. I personally don’t want to see any Facebook page that I have put energy into, flagged or shut down because of poor decisions to buy fake followers.
What’s the point here? The best way to build a solid Facebook presence is with legit tactics. Remember, where I said you get what you pay for? Cheap likes make for cheap social authority. Yes, you can pay to increase your following; I’m not saying that you can’t invest dollars into building your follower base, but it’s going to be strategic and it will be an investment. Or, focus on organic strategies for building a following. Then, you’ll KNOW that these followers actually care and are relevant for your brand.
Social media is complex and requires strategy from experienced digital marketers, but also from the business owner as well. Those that are invested in the process together will find the best success longterm and find that your following can bring you some great engagement!
You Might Also Like:
The Ultimate Facebook Marketing Guide (Social Media Examiner)