Buying Fans, What You Need To Know

The other day I received a chat message through Facebook with a link to a site purporting to be telling people the advantages of buying “likes” or commonly referred to as “fans”.

So I took a few minutes to peruse the site and sadly it never ceases to amaze me how words and data can be twisted to convince people that something so wrong may actually work.

First, I would never recommend buying fans for your business page no matter how desperate you are. And, two, if you are thinking about it…stop.

Oh, but those selling fake “fans” say it will help with authority building. Wrong! Okay, there might be a few people impressed by your elevated numbers but they will quickly leave when the content is garbage or the engagement is low.

Speaking of engagement, say you have 4500 fans but only 400 are real…guess what happens to engagement. Well, I’ll tell you…its lousy. You see on average less than 2% of you fans at any given time see your posts, so out of those 4500 fans only about 90 might see your message. Considering your real fans are only about 10% of the total of all your fans…maybe 9 will actually see your post. So 9 out of 4500.

Oh, but the website goes on to say they slowly replace the fake likes with real ones. Okay, so back to that 4500 number example…as we start getting real fans and that 4500 number goes up, how do we decide which are real and which are fake likes to replace? And, frankly who is actually going to do the fake like monitoring. Sounds very time consuming…and exhausting.

Last year, I was hired to admin a clients Facebook business page…they had over 5000 likes (fans) but the engagement was horrible. So I scanned through the “insights” of the page and discovered about 6 months prior the page went from 579 fans to 4975 fans over night. Yep an increase of 4500 fans in a 24 hour period.

Instead of trying to fix that business page, I created a new one. The client couldn’t believe I would trash their 5000 fans…even if they were fake. A new page, new fans…and 6 months later the engagement with each post was more amazing then the last. Sure this client might have less than 500 fans now, but it’s growing every day. The comments on the page are from real people who are sharing their life, then getting their friends to comment as well.

I’m a big believer in QUALITY over QUANTITY.

Forget the big list…give me a small list with quality names who enjoy what I post, who bond with my message and who place their trust in me.

A social page with lots of fans that provide absolutely zero engagement is like a brick wall…you can talk to it all day…but it will never have a conversation with you.

Your fan page shouldn’t ever be a brick wall…ever.  Not with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or any other social network.

The reason why people join your fan page is because you provide awesome content that they want to be apart of, they want to feel they can interact with you and have a meaningful conversation.

So forget the notion of buying fake anything…grow your fan page with real fans one at a time.