Should you buy Facebook Likes for your Fanpage?

Should you buy Facebook likes that fake to improve the social presence of your product or website? Well, I did a quick experiment to find out. Read this post before making such a move. In the today's world the importance of social media in sell your products / blog and promote your business cannot be over emphasized. Unfortunately, growing dedicated follower community is a slow and tedious process. Realizing this several small businesses have popped up promising to increase your Facebook likes, Twitter followers, among others. You can now buy Facebook likes or other Social Media followers fpr your blog or product.

Buy Facebook Likes

A quick search on Fiverr, the famous $5 gig site returns the following results:

For $5, you can buy 100, 500, or sometimes even 2000 Facebook likes in a matter of hours or days. There are several other websites that make such services as well. But the question is, should you buy Facebook likes that are fake?

The Experiment

I created a Facebook Fanpage for one of my blogs and conducted a quick experiment to check this out. I purchased a gig on Fiverr that promised 500+ Facebook likes in 24 hours. A typical process goes like this:

• You buy Facebook likes gig on Fiverrr
• You will an email asking for your Facebook Fanpage and current like count
• You send the asked information
• You receive a confirmation email after the order has been delivered

The picture below shows a typical email exchange after you place the order:

Sure enough, the next morning I wake up and check my Fanpage and I see 603 extra Facebook likes. All with almost complete profiles and pictures.

Analysis

First let us see what the advantages if you buy Facebook likes and see some of the drawbacks.

Advantages

1. Almost instant large social presence
2. Improved credibility: Visitors see the huge number of Facebook fans and become impressed/interested
3. Faster growth: Sometimes there is a minimum threshold beyond which your Facebook likes grow faster. More visitors may inclined to like a blog that has, say 100 likes, than blogs that have, say 10 likes.

Disadvantages

1. Irrelevant Profile Pictures: Take a look at the picture above. The fan profile pictures look like those used in hair salons. Almost all of them look similar. Moreover, many profiles have bikini-clad women as profile pictures. The question is will these profiles fit your audience profile? I bet that if you are a blog with good original content your answer would be typically NO. You can circumvent this problem by not displaying a Facebook Fan Box or displaying a Facebook Fan Box without Faces.
2. Lack of Engagement: You might have a large community of Facebook fans. But they are fake. And so there is no real engagement and no shares/recommends. In many cases, these Facebook profiles may disappear over time.
3. Last but not the least, shortcuts are never a good idea. You may cheat yourself to the top but without good content and hardwork you cannot sustain in the long run.

Conclusion

So, should you buy Facebook likes? Well, you have some points to consider now. If you like what you are doing, enjoy blogging, and would like a slow but steadily growing community of engaging followers then the answer is pretty clear. But again if you want to increase your Facebook like count to a good number to attract more real fans, ahead and buy Facebook likes. Remember that if you don't display faces in your Fan Box, then only admins can see the profile pictures of your fans. Your visitors will see only the numbers. Ultimately, the decision to buy Facebook likes is yours. This post is only to help you consider all the points before you make the move.