The Wrong Way to Get Facebook Likes
· BlueHat Marketing
Simply put, the wrong way to get Facebook likes is by buying them. This normally involves paying a shady marketing company to acquire likes for you by exploiting a vast network of fake Facebook accounts. These accounts do not represent real people, don’t read your content, and don’t engage your brand. This is a short-term gain in likes, but it’s ultimately a dead-end. Furthermore, the end of the road for this type of activity just got a lot closer.
Facebook recently released a statement that indicated a strategy to combat fake ‘like’ generation on their network. This is an automated solution to get rid of instances of liking that are unengaged. It remains to be seen how this will actually work, and if it causes trouble for legitimate likes, but essentially it would entail the analysis of various metrics related to the liking account and how it interacts with a given page. This will undoubtedly help ad conversion rates and ultimately benefit business owners by refining their audience into real, engaged potential customers.
Until Facebook successfully implements this type of algorithm, in which case you won’t really have the choice to use these scams, there are still many good reasons why you shouldn’t go for this type of thing.
- You might alienate real fans. Yes, seeing a lot of likes on a page might create an aura of interest to a real person visiting the site, but they will catch on. Hundreds of likes with no activity on the page is suspicious, as is acquiring a ton of likes in a short period of time out of nowhere.
- No conversions. You are diluting your audience if you buy page likes. They won’t click on your links, like your posts, share your content, or buy your products.
- No long-term value. You are not building anything buy acquiring a list of fake followers or page likes. You are investing in a short-term strategy that will bring little to no return, and is constantly under threat (and now in a real way) from Facebook acting upon this type of scam.
So what’s the right way to get Facebook likes?
Be interesting to your audience, and to potential customers. Provide them with genuine content that they will find appealing, entertaining, clever or informative. It doesn’t have to be directly related to your business every time. You need to create a community, not just market to users. You need to interlink your websites with social media buttons, and enable sharing of content. It’s a much harder road, but the rewards are real and sustainable. Also, you don’t have to go at it alone. Blue Hat can help move you along the road to successful social media community building through our expertise and dedication to measurement and concrete results. We do the hard work and keep an eye on everything as it evolves so you can concentrate on running your business.
