Why buying Facebook Likes is not a good idea – even directly from Facebook, critic explains

There are 2 ways to buy Facebook Likes for your Facebook page – (1) Buy thousands of Facebook Likes cheap the illegal way (against Facebook TOS) from “click farms”, or (2) Buy direct from Facebook by paying Facebook to promote your Facebook page to get more Facebook Likes – the legal way.  You might have heard that paying “click farms” to gain Facebook Likes is not good business practice because they are not real Facebook members who will actively engage with your posts.  This is true.  But now apparently even buying ads direct from Facebook to gain Facebook Likes is not doing you any good – actually it’s doing you harm, according to popular Facebook critic, Derek Muller of the science YouTube channel Veritasium.

How can this be you ask, when you are buying direct?  Fake Facebook Likes are bad, either way you get them.  Through performing his own experiments, Mueller has come to the conclusion that the “click farms” that are getting paid to like pages are also liking other pages for free, clicking on Facebook ads, in order to seem less obvious.  So, you thought you were doing things the right way, helping your business grow with real people interested in your page, but you end up having to pay Facebook again – this time to get engagement.  You get the huge number of Facebook Likes on your page, but with that kind of ratio of a huge number of Likes and a lower percentage of Facebook users who like or engage in your posts, your posts start to display even less – perhaps much less than when you started.

Facebook displays posts from your page based on how users who have seen the post react – if some like it and comment on it or share it, then Facebook shares it with more people and more people, leading to it going viral.  But if your post is delegated to be shown on those fake Facebook Likes’ profiles, then you get 0 engagement, perhaps even the people that really like your Facebook page won’t even get your posts displayed in their feeds.

So what is the best way to increase Facebook Likes on your page?  Mueller tested the theory of whether limiting Facebook advertising to the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK would only give him real Likes, staying away from the “click farms” deemed to be located in developing countries.   But he found he still got fake Likes – users who liked thousands of items, and uncharacteristically for a real profile.   So the best way to promote your business on Facebook – probably the “old fashioned way” of hard work: create posts that are interesting, and provide promotions where users must like your Facebook page to qualify, like many of the news stations are doing.

Watch Mueller’s video for more details:

Mueller’s video has gone viral, with over 900,00 views in about one day of being posted.  Facebook is pushing back, their response to this:

Facebook vehemently denies Muller’s claims and says it is constantly working to weed fake likes out of the news feed.

“Fake likes don’t help us. For the last two years, we have focused on proving that our ads drive business results and we have even updated our ads to focus more on driving business objectives,” wrote a spokesperson in an email. “Those kinds of real-world results would not be possible with fake likes.”
(via “Is Facebook Making Money Off Fake ‘Likes’?“)

Share your experience with buying Facebook Likes / Facebook Advertising in the comments section!