There you are, ready to click the BUY button for a bunch of new followers on Facebook.
My question to you…
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?!?”
Buying a following is ridiculous, un-necessary, and if you are thinking about doing this, I can assure you that you don’t have the right mentality to reach success and I am going to be telling you exactly why within this post.
If you are thinking about buying so-called “real” Facebook followers or know of others that are doing so, you are going to find what I am about to say a bit revealing (and you may not like what I have to say on this subject).
Why Buy a Social Following on Facebook?
People are buying followers on every social network from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Google + and there is an underlying reason for that. They can’t get a following naturally because they don’t have the right understanding of social engagement (ie. lack of proper training).
To me, that is a sign that you are doing something wrong right from the get go. If you would rather fake your way to “looking” successful, then you are going to be in for a long run within the business world. I know many of the so-called “top” internet marketing gurus and people that you would view as “credible” authorities are doing this to make people believe they really have a big following, but there is one obvious blunder. When they post something they get NO likes and NO comments.
A following is cheap. Here is just one example of the MANY services out there that allow you to “bulk” buy apparently REAL Facebook followers.
10,000 likes for $367. Not a bad deal right?
WRONG.
This is what I call a “false” following and the more you look for it, the more you will see it. When you go to someone’s Facebook profile and see that they have a lot of Likes, but really have no engagement within anything they post, this is exactly what they are doing. Buying likes.
But, Will a Great Facebook Following Positively Impact Perception?
To some, a high “following” can emulate success. The problem with a decent size Facebook following is that people will lose their trust and perception as soon as they find out you have no REAL following. How can they tell?
Well, first and foremost, your Facebook wall will look like a barren desert. No communication, no engagement, and no actual likes within your threads. If you have 10,000 people Liking your page, yet when you make a post you don’t get any comments, that shows people that you are a sham.
Secondly, if people go to your Facebook fan page or business page and see that you have just created it and you have a big following, credibility instantly goes bye bye.
Perception will only take you so far with your # of likes and if it is obvious that you have purchased likes, you are going to actually lose customers as a result.
Are the Companies Selling Facebook Followers a Scam?
Yes. I understand there is a business in selling dishonest services and this is the exact category I would classify the companies selling Facebook followings.
Here is how they work.
These companies have computer programs or “cheap help” that go out and create 1,000’s of different accounts usually through technology that allows them to be “perceived” as a real user to Facebook. These are all “computer generated” users, meaning that when they like you, you are actually getting a computer liking you.
So the first negative of paying is that you are not going to reap any rewards from having a following. They are not real people, so you will get no interaction within your wall posts, which in turn makes it look like you have a horrible brand. People will ask, “why does this company/website have a big following and get no engagement?”. This leads to adverse brand reputation.
Also, Facebook is getting better and better at determining what a “fake” user behaves like. They have removed millions of Facebook accounts in the last couple of years. They also are deleting SPAM users regularly, so you may pay for something now only to find out your 1,000’s Facebook followers you have paid for have suddenly all vanished.
So, will these companies actually get you followers? Yes, a lot of the time they will. Will they stick and will they actually be beneficial to your business? No, quite the contrary. You are trying to cheat the system and “fake” your success. This will always come back to bite you in the butt sooner or later.
A Facebook Following leads to Brand, Not Instant Conversions
If you think that your following is going to lead to sales or activity, you are fooled. If you manufacture your following or you create a following without “engaging” your followers, then you are going to see very little results from your following.
It is like putting a false “pay day” on your website saying that you make millions online when you are struggling just to get by. I guess they say, fake it so you can make it…and that is exactly what you are trying to do if you are buying Facebook, Twitter, or Google + following.
It will only hurt you in the long run, I will bet on it.
You can either be the with FAKE friends, or a REAL following
If you buy friends, they are not going to stick by your side, they are not going to interact, and they definitely are not going to buy from you based on your recommendations. In fact, if you are buying Facebook followers, chances are they are not even real!
If you want to be successful within the social marketing world, you need to understand how to properly create a brand and a real following. One that will engage in your posts, will share your content, and will trust you (and buy from you) as a result.
You have two approaches when it comes to social:
(1) Buy a fake following and FAIL
(2) Create a real following and SUCCEED
There is a lot of social marketing help out there, most people that are “social media” experts are also complete scams. Instead of trusting someone to do this work for you (and someone that doesn’t really understand your business), it is best that you LEARN how social media works and to do this I suggest you get some top tier training on social marketing and engagement. This is a skill that you can learn and your business will only benefit from as a result.
My Final Verdict of Buying REAL Facebook Followers?
…you can’t BUY a following. You gotta earn it! If you are trying to buy your way to success you need to look at yourself right now and decide if you have what it takes to earn money online (because this mentality is not going to lead you to success). I’m sorry, but someones gotta break the news to you.
If you have any feedback or comments on anything related to this thread, I would love to hear it. Please drop me a note in the comments below! 🙂
Hi, Kyle, you are absolutely right, I was so blind for this and was about to commit a mistake of getting fake followers.
These followers would never engage or do anything that will take your business to the next level.
I was about to fall in addmefast’s trap, thanks for this useful post and have a great day! 🙂
Well the fact is, they are FAKE. Fake people of course won’t engage in your posts, won’t like anything, and won’t add any value other than your “perceived” following. In my opinion it is very unethical to fake a following, but unfortunately there are many industry folks that are doing this and as a result, fooling people into thinking they are more popular or credible than they actually are.
Hey Kyle,
I hate to admit it, but I did the exact same thing recently. Fortunately it was for only $5.00 on Fiverr for 3,000+ REAL Twitter followers. I was proud of this until reading this post. Now I am ashamed because I am not the kind of person to fake it until I make it. I want real success. In my defense though I only did it to get the ball rolling and I honestly thought that they were real people to market to. I wasn’t about to reply on here at all, but I have a very serious question that needs answering. My question is this; Although I made the mistake of buying twitter followers, How do I clean this up? Or is it even possible? Do I just have to live with it until twitter deletes them? Ok, I guess that was more than 1 question but I need help obviously.
Thanks.
Fair enough David, you can’t beat yourself up over it. It is natural to want things the “easy” way and in the fastest way possible. We all want success faster than it happens. We want to create a brand faster than it happens. We want a vastly significant business faster than it happens. The reality of it though is that there is a proven path and that path is the best shortcut to success.
Trying to cut corners, or worse, exaggerate success to proper success is something that I don’t recommend although it happens far more frequently than you can imagine and some of the biggest gurus touting their massive success are the biggest culprits. You learnt your lesson, there is little you have to do to clean up what you have done other than move forward in an ethical and forward thinking manner.
Hey Kyle, I have to admit, when I first come across this article I was kind of annoyed as this was something I was about to do.
After reading the article, I have to say it turned out to be a bit of an eye opener.
The reason I was going to buy some followers was just to get the ball rolling. I understand that I wouldn’t get any interaction or conversions, but I was wondering why anyone would start following me in the first place as I’d seem unpopular.
Now I can see it from the other point of view. It would look even more strange to a real person if I did have a large following but no comments or shares.
I think I may leave it alone after reading this, thanks for the perspective.
By the way, you mention “top tier training on social marketing and engagement”, what’s the difference between the two?
Buying followers is no different than coming out and simply “lying” about success, lying about your experience, etc. It follows the concept of faking it before you make it and although there is going to be a natural pull to do so, it can look even worse if you do this because these are not REAL people and they are not going to offer any value to your actual business (other than just the fake like/follower numbers).
I see many of the “gurus” out there doing this. They showcase 100K+ followers, but they literally get no engagement on their facebook updates. It doesn’t look good.
Save your money and your time, there are much more important things you can be focusing on within your business.
As for social marketing and engagement, it is much more about engaging people on social and offering value versus simply “selling”. I find that those that get NO reaction within my Facebook feed (along with others) are those that are constantly selling and not engaging. There is a right way and a wrong way with social marketing.
Hi Kyle,
That is something I always feel kinda mystery before. I always see some service about it and doubt how they did. As a seller, at some point, really want to try this type of service and make the fan page “NICE”.
Now I got the answers from your article. Buying facebook like fools ourselves and fools your real followers.
Thanks!
Yeah, they are all fraudulent Likes…often times fake accounts or bot account on Facebook. FB is pretty good at finding and removing these bots, but they cannot catch every new account.
Fake Likes will only hurt you and when you have a bunch of them only to have them vanish because Google has reported them as bots, it only looks bad on you.
I have read about this before. It is not really a good idea since the number of likes you have will not really impress anyone. You need actual conversation(engagement) to make your facebook business page look appealing. I understand that people want it now, but it is better to just put in the work.
Exactly and it is tough enough to get real engagement with REAL followers let alone trying to prove your credibility with paid/fake followers. There is nothing that is a positive about buying Facebook likes.
Hi Kyle,
Way too often people look for the easy way out… buying followers instead of earning them can certainly be classified as an easy way out. We all know that taking the easy way out never works. Buying followers certainly diminishes your creditability and integrity in the online business world. Without creditability and integrity you will never can trust and people do NOT deal with those they don’t trust.
These followers are fake. Plain and simple. Folks are always looking way for an “easy way out” and unfortunately you cannot buy your way to popularity and/or success. Quite the contrary.
People get fooled into these schemes because these scam companies selling fake Facebook fans and likes lie about their authenticity. It is very unfortunate that folks fall into this trap and hopefully by them reading this before spending money on these schemes they will save their money.
Kyle I have read a few of these and going back to respond on the various ones. I appreciate what you teach. For me, the Social Networking like Facebook and others I have avoided. I guess it is time for me to get involved. One thing I have felt and you confirm is to purchase a list is just throwing money into the garbage bin, you get no real tangible benefit. Daniel
Kyle what do you think of advertising your facebook fan page through paid traffic via facebook. I have my daily budget set at $5 a day. I get a few likes a day from this traffic, not sure if it will pay off in the long run. Would be interested to hear your thoughts on this.
I think there are much wisers ways to spend your money. I would suggest that you invest this money into PPC via Google Adwords or BingAds far before you waste (yes, WASTE) your money paying for likes. Likes are not going to equate to business like targeting people through relevant search terms and getting them to your site.
I really can’t imagine why anyone would think a bunch of fake followers would help them in any way shape or form. People follow you because they like you or like what you have to offer. So crazy! Thanks Kyle! At least I know I’ve made the right decision while not falling for this type Scam. Although, I do realize how easy it is to fall victim to all the pushy scammer’s out there. Thanks to people like you, soon an end will be put to such nonsense.
The nonsense will never end…however, we can do our best to help prevent this and the many other scams out there. The people buying “Likes” are typically in the business of scamming as well, people trying to prop themselves. They say fake it before you make it and this is what is happening at a very high rate out there.
All too often people just want to see that nice traffic surge to their sites. I know that many “gurus” also swear that getting said traffic surge and facebook likes will result in higher rankings within the SERP’s. The sad, honest truth of the matter is that many of the purchased facebook likes are bots and Google as well as other search engines know it.
That results in your site literally taking a nose-dive in the rankings that many people can not recover from. It’s sad because it shows that most companies selling this service simply want your money and don’t care that their service will destroy your business.
Great post on bringing this to light Kyle.
GURU’s needs to start standing for something else. People that define themselves as a guru are usually the ones doing a disservice to the entire community. Likes do not translate to search rankings, in particular fake likes…perhaps if Facebook owned Google, this might be a more prominent metric, but there is absolutely no data sharing going on.
Keep letting folks spend their money on fake likes Tony, while the folks that know what they are doing (definitely not these so-called GURUS) will be going about their business in the right way.
A self-styled “business guru, author and genius” (I kid you not) over here in England bought followers and had a website built claiming he had over 100,000 of them. He did for about two weeks, then numbers dropped to 41,000 over a 24 hour period. His real following is about 1,700. He didn’t look great because the ridiculously high drop off proved his duplicity. Hah!
Pretty pathetic isn’t it Paul. Many of the guru’s are teaching stuff like this, the are teaching fraud and impersonation of someone that is much more successful than they are. Hmmm…reminds me of most gurus out there!
Good article. I had a guy who wanted to help us market our nutritional supplement company. He was a marketing “guru” who said he had a lot of “special sauce” techniques. Guess what? One of them was to buy Facebook likes. It turned me off immediately even before I read this post.
Thanks for the good info!
Trevor
Good thing you didn’t buy into this guy Trevor. The best way to market any company is to learn how to market it. The problem with this industry is that anyone can self describe themselves as an expert, yet they are doing shady stuff like buying Likes. True colors shining through there…
Well said. I’ve bought something related to that but not exactly. I’m talking about Facebook likes, plus ones, and twitter retweets, but all these didn’t go to a fan page, they went to my website instead. I paid just $5 for this on Fiverr and I got 15 – 50 of the aforementioned social shares. It was one of my numerous attempts to improve my search rankings, lol. They did nothing, and the number of shares I had gradually lessened with time (I guess the spam accounts were found and deleted, just as you said it happens). I’m just glad that it was only $5 and not something bigger.
Thanks, and looking forward to more enlightening posts from you :-).
Yeah, thankfully you didn’t waste any more money on this Charles. Live and learn!
I’ve seen how you can buy ads and such on Facebook. I know social media is important but I didn’t realize people were willing to pay that kind of money to get likes.
Will it really effect your Google ratings so much that it would be worth it. All this is gonna do is prompt another animal to come out of Google search engines.
I don’t understand why people cheat when it is so easy to get rankings with a little dedication. The traffic may come slow at first but to see it start to come in waves is the best feeling of success.
Thanks for another great post Kyle
Google is unable to determine the real “quality” of Facebook likes or Tweets, therefore they do not consider this within their algorithm. One thing they can determine is engagement, Google+ values, and Google authorship….along with of course quality of content. These are things that should always remain a focus.
Very revealing post Kyle. I’ve never considered buying followers or likes. To me that’s just stupid and it makes no sense especially if you don’t understand what you’re buying.
I’ve always wanted to know where the followers were coming from because it’s obvious that you aren’t getting real people since
mostall of these services GUARANTEE the number of likes or followers.Nobody has every approached me to “like” a facebook page for some service/company/person I didn’t know about so I’m sure it’s not going to happen with others. Real people like whatever it is they actually like. Definitely a scam.
Bottom line, if you don’t understand what you’re buying then you’re asking to be scammed and deserve to have an empty wallet even if its for your own good.
Exactly Jay, too many people will just follow the “herd” mentality and buy what others tell them they need. Unfortunately for them and unless they can read between the lines, they will fall for these sorts of things time and time again.
A following on Facebook or otherwise is absolutely useless unless it is real and as many have said, if you buy likes they could be there one day and the next day Facebook or Twitter will delete all of them as they know which users within their system are fraudulent and which ones are not (all of the REAL users are FAKE users FYI).
Once upon a time, you could purchase traffic and it would work but no longer. Anyone that tries to sell you on that concept is leading you down a rose covered path.
Learning how to actually connect with your audience is an art. But it is an art that can be learned. Thanks to Wealthy Affiliate it is one that I am learning.
Thanks for that.
It is an art form that seems to be going away…like canning food…or being willing to work to create success. People that invest in creating a REAL brand are those that are rewarded not only with a high level of “perception”, but they are those that will be able to post something and get a reaction, get shared, get engagement, and get additional following as a result.
I think you’re absolutely right that having people follow you on Facebook helps to build your brand, but doesn’t necessarily lead to conversions. In today’s world where you can get a refund for most things, if you are trying ‘fake a following’ to sell something that people don’t really want, you aren’t going to make a whole lot of money.
Facebook can be a good place to engage people – I’m not very active on Facebook but every once in a while I have people leave me messages and ask questions. I’d rather have two REAL people that I can have a conversation with on FB to show my brand reliability that 200 Likes or Followers that add nothing of value. Even if you can fool an algorithm into thinking you’re hot stuff on FB, any human user can see difference.
I agree Nathaniell, I would rather have a handful of people that actually trusted my brand then 100,000 people that were bought. The reason is “social marketing” is all about social engagement and if you are faking the following, you are not getting ANY engagement. This means that you are completely missing the bigger picture and if you are faking this following, you are going to end up faking MANY other aspects of your business to get all the faking aligned.
It really does say a lot about a person and their business ethic when they go off buying Facebook likes. I can almost assure you that anyone doing this is either running an unethical operation or they are struggling deeply with their business and acting out of desperation.
I hate to say it, but I actually bought followers. You know kyle, sometimes you just want to take a short cut to success. I know bad, but when you can pay a small sum of money to speed up the likes on your facebook it seems like a good deal.
I wish I had read this before I spent the $500 on some likes. It turned out that you are correct and not one of the likes every commented on a thing on my fan page and it didn’t lead to any more following at all. These are a big scam and i promise not to fall for anything like this again.
I follow all your posts kyle and I appreciate you looking out for us that are more gullible.
It’s OK Jill, it sounds like you have learned from your mistake. It is one of those situations where you have the two voices. The one telling you that you should fake your success, the other telling you that you shouldn’t because it doesn’t really seem that ethical. Sometimes the WRONG voice ends up winning the final decision.
I can tell you that the realization that this was not such a good decisions proves that you have a bright future ahead of you. If you are going to dip your feet into the social world, make sure you do it naturally and do it with the focal point being engagement, no sheer numbers.