The temptation to buy Facebook likes is great, no doubt. Everyone wants to increase the number of followers and page engagement and many websites provide Facebook likes for low prices.
However, buying Facebook likes not only doesn’t help, but it will even damage your business.
This article will elaborate on what you really get when you buy Facebook likes, their dark sources, and how they damage your business.
You will also learn about legitimate ways to get real likes from real people interested in your brand and a couple of other subtle ways to grow the likes on your Facebook page for free.
How people buy likes on Facebook
In most cases, the search for Facebook likes starts at search engines. People will type phrases to lead them to sites where they can purchase Facebook likes.
They use lead phrases such as buy Facebook page likes, where to buy Facebook page likes cheap, where to buy real Facebook likes, the best site to buy Facebook page likes or even buy Facebook like.
Sites give buyers options to select the type of likes they need, whether on a page or a post. They’ll pick the number of likes desired depending on their budget, enter their Facebook fan page URL, pay, and wait for results.
Promotional slogans of Facebook like sellers feature terms like Buy Facebook Likes 100% Active & Real at cheap prices, Permanent Fans Guarantee, Refund Guarantee, 24/7 live customer support, and Real Likes from Real People.
What you really get when you buy Facebook likes
Indeed, these Buy Facebook Like services may provide you with Facebook likes as promised. The sad reality is that you run the risk of falling for fake accounts, bots, and uninterested parties.
Fake accounts are hoax accounts used to push likes to your account. Sellers also use bots – a web of automated accounts appearing legitimate. If you are lucky enough to get real likes from real people, you have no guarantee of their interest in your products or services.
One more thing you should consider is that most of the real likes from real people you get are generated in click farms.
Click farms are click fraud schemes where a click fraudster contracts and pays peanuts to large groups of low-income workers in developing countries. In exchange, the workers click on the fraudster’s advertisement links. They can sign up for newsletters, surf a website, or click shared links.
Using click farms to earn likes is inhumane and unethical. You will end up with likes from vulnerable people going through hardships. They may not be interested and may never identify with your brand.
Why buying Facebook likes will damage your business
Buying Facebook likes damages businesses. Period.
It negatively affects your revenues, EdgeRank, organic reach, lead generation, audience analysis, ad performance, and business credibility. Furthermore, Facebook also removes fake accounts and likes from bots.
EdgeRank and organic reach
In the past, Facebook used the EdgeRank algorithm to determine the content that will be displayed on people’s News Feeds.
Today, Facebook uses advanced machine learning algorithms to determine the content reach for organic posts and paid campaigns. Organic reach refers to the number of people who see your content on Facebook for free.
Buying Facebook likes from fake accounts, bots, and uninterested people disguised as real will drive poor content performance due to zero engagement. Facebook’s algorithm will collect negative results, and your organic reach will drop. The more fake likes you have, the lower your organic reach will be.
Lead generation
Facebook is a top lead generation channel. However, you will only reap the benefits if you have real likes from people interested or likely to be interested in your brand.
Facebook likes from click farms, bots, and fake accounts will give you an irrelevant audience. Such likes will never earn you conversions; these people will never become your customers.
Revenues
As you spend on ads, you expect returns on ad spend in terms of both engagement and revenue growth.
But your revenue also depends on the audience you target. Since buying Facebook likes gives you a bogus audience, you will waste your money because you will be showing your ads to a non-existing or uninterested audience.
Audience analysis and ad performance
Buying Facebook likes gives you an audience that makes it difficult to run successful ad campaigns.
You can’t tell the interests of such an unknown audience. Moreover, it is hard to determine the true characteristics of your real followers.
In this case, creating custom audiences will be a major hurdle. You will end up targeting people who will never convert, so again, you are wasting your ad spend.
Business credibility
Ingenuine likes might damage your brand image. If the likes on your page are fake, people will know.
For example, it is unrealistic that you have thousands of followers, but they hardly interact with your content.
Your business will lose credibility and drive away genuine customers. Engagement will reduce gradually as your audience will see your unwillingness to grow meaningful connections with real people.
In worse scenarios, clients may leave negative reviews warning other potential leads, further damaging your business.
Buying likes might make it harder for you to get your page verified on Facebook. Getting the blue verification checkmark is very important for your business credibility. Therefore, you should read our article explaining how to get verified on Facebook.
Facebook removes fake accounts
A double loss may be inevitable when you buy fake Facebook likes, as Facebook is constantly finding and removing fake accounts.
You may lose the followers you bought and might even lose your Facebook page for engaging in fraud.
Instead of buying Facebook likes, run Facebook ads
Instead of buying Facebook likes, run Facebook ads to get real likes, and make your page profitable.
It'll be easiest for you to manage all your Facebook assets - page, ad account, Meta Pixel, etc. - using the Facebook Business Manager.
Advantages of running Facebook ads to get page likes
Running Facebook ads will get you likes from real people as they will be displayed to real people. You will not need to worry about fake likes from fake accounts and bots.
Moreover, you will get likes from a relevant audience. Through its algorithms, Facebook will display your ads to real people based on their interactions and browsing behavior. This way, you will get likes from people with interest in your product.
Tips about running ads to promote your page
1. Interest targeting and lookalike audiences
Interest targeting means you target audiences based on their Facebook interests. In this case, as an advertiser, you can select an interest that you believe is ideal for your products and services and Facebook will show your ads to people who have this interest.
Interest targeting is a good starting point for beginner advertisers with little or no data to use for targeting to grow their customer base.
When you’ll have more data to use for targeting, you can create custom audiences and afterward, create lookalike audiences based on them.
For example, you can create a custom audience of page followers or Pixel-based custom audiences of people who have visited and interacted with your website.
You can learn everything you need to know in our article about creating Pixel-based audiences.
2. Page Likes ads
As their name suggests, Facebook Page Likes ads are a good strategy for you to increase page likes using paid advertising. These ads will help you reach people who may like your page and be interested in your content or a business like yours.
These are special ads that aren’t created through the Ads Manager, but directly from your business page. If you want to learn more about creating these ads, check out this help article from Facebook.
3. Experiment with your ads: test different creatives and audiences
To get the best results from your ads, you must test many different audiences, creatives, and pieces of copy.
Once you figure out what works, you can scale your campaigns and boost your revenues.
Read more of our articles to learn how to leverage video and poll ads. In addition, using more emojis in your Facebook ads and posts can also drive more engagement from your audience.
4. Analyze your ad performance and find out what works
As you run ads, you should analyze their performance and identify what works best for your business. Instead of relying on human analytics coupled with inaccuracies, you can bank on effective ad tools like the ones provided by Madgicx.
Madgicx’s platform can provide you with all the insights you need to understand your ad performance. It even allows you to generate reports that you can share with your team and clients.
Other methods you should apply rather than buying Facebook likes
As you already realized by now, your business is so valuable to risk its integrity and credibility by buying Facebook likes. In addition to running Facebook ads, the methods below can also help you get more likes and increase engagement.
1. Find the ideal time to post on social media
Post or schedule your content on social media at a time of maximum visibility and engagement by your audience.
Posting your content on your Facebook page at the appropriate time can maximize audience reach. Use Facebook Insights to see and track the time with the highest engagement – the time when your audience is most active.
2. Post your content on Facebook groups
Facebook groups provide a great audience for your content. You can post to a group affiliated with your Facebook page or groups that you have joined.
Groups provide interactive conversations and will allow you to build better relationships. In addition to joining existing groups, creating a Facebook group for your page can be handy. Even if a user misses a post on your page, they can see the post in the group.
Note: Initially, Facebook allowed joining Facebook groups only as a personal profile. Today, you can also join a group as a Facebook page, although that depends on the group admin settings.
3. Engage in conversations with your audience
Conversational engagements can help you create stronger, better, and healthy relationships with your audience.
Engage with posts in groups and on pages in your business area; comment on posts and respond to comments; use emojis to express your reactions.
How engaging in conversations with your audience can earn you likes
- Get your audience interested. When you engage with your audience in conversations, you increase engagement on your posts. The more engagement people have with your content, the higher the chances they’ll like your page.
- Earn your audience’s trust. Trusted Facebook pages get more likes. Strong conversational engagements with your audience create a business-customer connection. People will trust your brand more when you have higher post engagement, and you can gain more likes and followers on your page.
- Increase your reach. Facebook audiences like sharing engaging content with their friends and can even tag them in the comments. Ensure you create engaging posts as this is one of the most commendable ways to invite audience comments, reactions, and shares.
4. Create a Facebook contest
Run Facebook contests and reward winners with an attractive prize. You can use contests to make people like your Facebook page, share your content, or engage by commenting on your posts.
The benefits of Facebook contests
- Increase engagement. A successful contest should increase engagement on your Facebook page by attracting new and ideal fans who will interact with your content.
- Increase likes and followers. Contests attract people interested in your business, and they will like your page to get more content.
- Create awareness. You can grow your page and post likes when you create awareness about your page and products. Getting people to share your content with their friends will definitely help to increase your brand awareness.
- Gain leads and boost sales. As people engage with your content, they may be interested in the products and services you might be selling. Every real like and follower is a potential customer.
Quick tips for running a successful Facebook contest
- Adhere to Facebook’s rules. Familiarize yourself with the actions prohibited by Facebook. For example, avoid forcing people into the contest or asking them to flood other people’s timelines with your contest.
- Understand the different types of contests that Facebook supports. Facebook supports giveaways or prizes, elements of chance, and entry/registration promotions.
- Familiarize yourself with the differences among Facebook contests. For instance, in giveaway campaigns, people win prizes by chance, and they don't need to pay or purchase anything. Contests require people to put in some effort to win. Lotteries require people to pay or purchase and they are illegal in the US.
- Communicate all the necessary information about your contest. Your contest should not mislead your audience. Keep it straightforward and be truthful.
- Clarify that your contest is not associated with Facebook or in any way endorsed or sponsored by Facebook.
Conclusion
In conclusion, buying Facebook likes will damage your business. You will get fake likes from bots, fake accounts, and vulnerable people working for click farms in developing nations. These people are not interested in your brand.
The fake audience you get will hurt your EdgeRank and decrease your content’s organic reach. It will be difficult for you to generate real leads and analyze your audience. Your business will lose credibility, and Facebook will remove fake accounts, which will make you lose the likes.
Instead of buying Facebook likes, you can run Facebook ads. Advertising will get you real likes from real people who are interested in your brand.
To run successful Facebook ad campaigns you can start with interest targeting and progress to lookalike audiences once you have enough data. In addition, you can launch Facebook Page Likes ads to boost your page likes.
What’s very important is that you test many different audiences, creatives, and ad copies and always analyze your ad performance to find out what works best for you. Then, you can double down on your successful campaigns and maximize your results.
You can post at the right time when your audience is most active, post in relevant Facebook groups, engage with the audience in conversions, and create Facebook contests to broaden your reach.
To sum up, there are so many things you can do on Facebook that will help you promote your brand and grow your business.
Buying Facebook likes isn't one of them.
*Contributed to this article: Caleb M.
Running ads on Facebook doesn’t have to be tedious and time-consuming. Madgicx has all the solutions you need to keep your ads optimized 24/7 and maximize your ROI - all while spending less time managing your ads.
Yuval is the Head of Content at Madgicx. He is in charge of the Madgicx blog, the company's SEO strategy, and all its textual content.