Buying Fake Fans, Followers and Likes

Originally Published on LinkedIn.com on Sep 16, 2015 by Nathaniel Schooler
Surely a great idea for your business?
Social media marketers are under pressure to deliver tangible returns. Social media is unfortunately misunderstood in a lot of cases. Whilst within the marketing department these vanity metrics are a good way to gauge how tactical campaigns are working. They are certainly not a reliable way to track your return on investment.
Entire business models have been developed around fakes as you can see below.
Unfortunately like most industries there are profiteers who are taking advantage of the uninitiated. Below is an advertisement to become a reseller for supplying fake Facebook fans, YouTube views and fake Twitter followers. After you see what a great opportunity this is I will explain more about why people should not buy fakes.
This ‘opportunity’ provides you with a website that delivers you all the leads! People buy these all the time, so getting customers is not a problem!
They supply you with the fake fans, fake likes and fake views for your videos. It even says ‘with millions of existing and new websites being created every day, you will have no shortage of customers’
Once you get started your new Twitter followers are delivered by automated software within 24 hours. On other platforms from what I have read the fakes are delivered by people in developing countries.
Why you don’t want to use these fake services?
Buying fans, followers or views are some of the worst things you can do on social media and will either cost you your job or someone else will have to clean up the communities. Most professional marketers among us realise that these tactics are a false economy and cause someone a big headache further down the line.
Usually people who cut corners have no real strategy and lack valuable experience (unfortunately the small to medium-sized businesses lose out here as they generally don’t have the resources to invest).
Sometimes management teams are impressed with the wrong metrics as they lack specialist knowledge. Social media is relatively new and rather than understanding the correct revenue generating activities time is utilised ineffectually, analysing the wrong metrics or in most cases social media teams don’t have the right tools to track return on investment accurately.
Professional social media marketeers regularly analyse and clean up communities, working with the advertising platforms themselves in problem cases and with certain specialist tools.
Businesses need the correct expertise and an ethical team to ensure these problems are managed effectively maximising every advertising dollar and minimising the risk of reputation management issues.
Without proper analysis of communities and campaign ROI the age-old ‘spray and pray’ advertising trap awaits; just like the ‘good old days’ of delivering impersonalised advertisements in the wrong locations, to the wrong people without knowing which marketing efforts produced return on investment.
Four reasons you should not buy them
1) When businesses pay to advertise in front of all their fake fans, who benefits? The platforms of course, Google (who own YouTube), Facebook, Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Twitter.
2) These tactics are just why people say ‘social media doesn’t work’ generally no further investment is made into building their communities or their budget is reduced by the CFO.
3) Buying fake fans doesn’t generate revenue! (Some could argue it may from a credibility standpoint, but imagine if an analysis of your accounts is performed by a potential new client and this information is made public).
4) If your fake fans or followers engage with your content they will interfere with your data analysis, meaning any metrics you track will not be accurate.
Before you think about buying fake likes, fans and views think about how it would look to anyone who takes the time to analyse your accounts and how much money you could cost your business in lost revenue or credibility over the longer term.
A lot of planning goes into social media marketing and if the right strategy is implemented it can deliver huge customer service cost reductions and grow your sales and long-term customer loyalty.
Using paid advertisements and community management can deliver you some great ROI but like everything in business a need for analysis of the results is key to your success. Enabling you to allocate extra resources if certain campaigns are performing better than others and pause ones that don’t deliver after your initial testing phases.