Why Buying Facebook Likes is a Bad Idea

In Marketing by Melissa Meschke

But it’s the ultimate ‘get popular fast scheme’, right? Wrong. Buying likes for your business’s Facebook page actually does more harm than good to your Facebook page.

It seems like the perfect plan; just spend a couple hundred bucks and you can add hundreds or even thousands of likes for your Facebook page. It’ll make you look more popular, raise engagement, and increase sales!

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

When you buy Facebook likes, you are mostly likely purchasing likes from all the wrong people. Most of the likes you will receive in schemes like this are from ‘click farm’ fake accounts. According to USA Today, Facebook’s January quarterly report estimated 14.1 million of their 1.18 billion active user accounts are fraudulent. Facebook actively seeks out these fake users and shuts them down. So not only are you not buying ‘real’ likes, but as fake accounts are shut down, you will see your like number keep dropping instead of increasing.

This is just one of the main problems with buying likes. The other comes in the engagement itself. Social Media Today did some math:

So, unlike popular understanding, purchasing likes will not increase your engagement. Purchasing likes actually makes your page look like it has worse engagement than you did before! Fake accounts will not interact with your posts because, well, they are not real people and have no real interest in your business.

So what can you do to increase your likes? Facebook makes it easy to increase your like number with several pretty inexpensive options. You can run like campaigns, boost posts, and advertise your page. Each of these are much more likely to increase engagement with your posts and to gain you real fans and potential customers.

Do you know anyone that has purchased likes? How did it effect their reach and engagement?

Until next time!
~Melissa