Why You Should Avoid Facebook Fake Likes Like A Plague

A Facebook fan page is a way for a business to establish its presence on Facebook. And some business owners consider their number of fan page likes as a major social proof – the more likes you have the more credible your business is. If you’re among these entrepreneurs who think this way, then you better think again.

You have to remember that Facebook has already been infiltrated by spammers - the number of Facebook likes alone is no longer an accurate social proof. Likes can be bought so that anybody or any business can appear important, even when they’re not. If you want some sort of social proof to show your audience, then show them how your fan page performs in terms of engagement. 

Here are some more reasons why you should stop counting likes and avoid fake likes like a plague:

Fake Facebook likes won’t help you achieve your marketing objectives.
Fake likes won’t help increase your revenue. If the likes you get came from countries that your business does not service, then they basically mean nothing to you.  You’re basically wasting your marketing content.  How can they relate to your marketing message if it’s not meant for them? How can you expect them to act on your calls-to-action if they have no interest in your products or your business?

Fake likes are just vanity metrics, they don’t measure real success.
As mentioned above, your main metrics should be engagement rather than the number of likes. Facebook is about the “after-like” relationship you build with your audience, and you can’t build any relationship if the bulk of what you have are fake, paid likes.

Fake likes can have a detrimental effect on the reach of posts you share.
There’s a chance that you won’t be able to reach your real audience because of fake likes. Say for example, your Facebook page currently has 1200 likes, 1000 of which are fake likes. If you share a post, your engagement ratio will be low because not a single one of the fake likes would ever engage with any of your posts. Facebook will then consider your contents to be low quality and irrelevant, reducing the reach of your subsequent posts accordingly. This means that now, only a fraction of the 200 real audience you have will be able to see your posts. 

Fake likes will mess with your overall Facebook marketing campaign.
Because fake likes have impeded the natural reach of your Facebook business page, you won’t be able to use your Facebook page to truly analyze the behavior of your customers, like what type of content they like or what they need. Basically, fake likes impede you from getting to know your audience on a much deeper level, thus hindering you from improving your product or service.

Final Thoughts
Generating natural and organic Facebook likes may take more effort, but at least they will give you the result you need – a real audience that engages and substantial data from which to measure and analyze the success, or the lack thereof, of your marketing campaign.