Why Buying Facebook Fans is a Bad Idea
Posted on Feb 06, 2012 |
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Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Strategy
Social Media is about communication and interaction. It is all about Quality over Quantity, and being able to interact with your followers and build a strong base and foundation for future growth. Buying followers and likes plays a negative roll in doing this.
Facebook EdgeRank
Have you heard of Facebook EdgeRank? Facebook’s EdgeRank is a behind the scenes formula that Facebook uses to measure the general value of your Facebook Page.
What EdgeRank does is essentially determine whether or not your content is worth Facebook showing to its users. It creates an affinity score between your page and a particular user, adds a content type-specific weight (is it a link, a picture, status update, etc), and then adds a freshness factor to round things out.
Now that you have read that, do you now realize that when you log into Facebook, you don't see all your friends news feeds, only a particular few? It's not that everybody stopped posting, its has more to do with the implementation of Facebook's EdgeRank.
Why Buying Facebook Fans is Bad
So now that you under Facebook EdgeRank, do you see why buying Facebook Fans is bad? If you purchase fans for your brand, and you change your number of likes from 100 to 1,100, while it looks impressive, you have seriously damaged your Facebook EdgeRank.
So before, when you posted to your 100 followers, and 10 either commented or liked, you had a 10% interaction rate. Now, that same 10 people who interact only provides you less than 1% interaction rate. That decrease in interaction will cause your EdgeRank to lower, and will cause your posts to be shown less and less, as Facebook deems the content you provide as unimportant and not interesting.
Analytics
Now that you have these larger followers, it becomes harder to analyze and report the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Now you get a lower interaction rate, and it is impossible to determine the effectiveness of your campaign since a majority of your followers are not real.
We believe in Quality over Quantity
There is nothing wrong with the size of your followers. If you have a good product and provide great service, you will be able to organically grow and develop your followers through methods not requiring the need to purchase fans. Marketing campaigns and efforts can be tailored and marketed to focus on growing this quicker, but taking the quick way route of just buying fans, while being impressive short-term, will have major ramifications on your long-term success.
What are your thoughts about buying Facebook Fans?
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