For Once and For All: Is Buying Facebook Likes Worth It?

There’s a lot of conflicting information about buying Facebook likes. Some people claim it’s legitimate. Some people claim it’s dangerous, but can be made to work when you do it right. Some people talk about legitimate sellers, in a world full of scammers. Others offer evidence of consistent failure with every aspect of the process. So, to answer the question once and for all, let’s discuss the intricacies of buying Facebook likes.

It’s Against Facebook’s Rules

First of all, buying likes from any source other than Facebook’s PPC ads with the “page like” objective is against the rules and terms of service for using Facebook. This means, if you were to buy likes, you will be subject to a wide range of possible penalties, depending on the scale of the purchase.

First, you can have the likes removed. Facebook has a number of systems in place, ranging from personal review to robotic scans, specifically designed to identify and remove fake likes. It doesn’t matter if the account is clearly fake or passing itself off as real; the account can be removed, and with it any like it has performed.

Second, identifying fake likes on your account can lead Facebook to perform an audit of your likes as a whole. This will help them determine more fake profiles to remove, but it will also result in the mass removal of likes from your page. Facebook doesn’t care if you paid for them; you broke the rules.

Third, if the scale of the violation is large enough, you risk the suspension or removal of your account entirely. This is a rare penalty, but it occurs fairly often with businesses on the “wrong side” of the law; businesses selling other black hat services, for example, using bought likes to look more legitimate.

Shady Websites can Steal Information or Money

This is the second risk you run when you purchase likes from a seller. Depending on how that seller operates, you’re putting yourself at significant risk of account violation. At the most basic level, you might find the seller just takes your money and disappears. This isn’t a huge deal if you’re just losing the $5 you spent on Fiverr, but if you’re spending hundreds of dollars on a more “professional” looking service, you can find yourself out a significant amount of money.

Worse, you have no legal recourse. You can take the site to court, if you can get any information about the seller, but there’s little chance you’ll be able to pull off any settlement that would cover your legal costs, let alone recoup your losses. After all, many like sellers are base in developing nations where monthly incomes are measured in tens of dollars.

You also run a risk if you’re using certain sellers that want your information to use your account. They’ll look legitimate and make you trust them, right up until they gain access to your account, steal whatever information is available to them, and disappear. You have little alternative but to go through the lengthy process of securing your account and protecting yourself from future intrusion.

You End Up Contracting Click Farms

When you purchase likes, most of the time what you’re getting is a bunch of people sitting in a small, hot building in Bangladesh. These people are working their way through lists of links, clicking to like each page in turn. To obfuscate their actions from Facebook’s automatic detections, they click ads on the sidebar or other links they see and like those pages too. They’re handed another file, another list, and your business page is listed along with dozens or hundreds of others.

Sure, you get a bunch of likes. You get a bunch of likes from these people sitting in these digital sweatshops, who don’t even know what the name of your business is. Some of them may not even be able to read English. They certainly don’t have the money or the interest to go in and buy your product based on that like. They don’t check news feeds, they just like pages, day in and day out.

Oh, and how far do you think your $5 payment is going to stretch with 1,000 likes? After the seller takes their cut, each individual person in that sweatshop is making a penny from you, tops. You can’t even assuage your guilt by pretending you’re helping provide work for these poor, unfortunate souls.

The Users that Like Your Page are Fake

This was partially mentioned above, but who do you think is liking your page when you buy likes? It might be people from developing nations. It might be robot-controlled accounts. It might be people operating bot farms in the middle of Utah. You don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. The end result is the same; none of these accounts are valuable to you at all.

Nothing, anywhere on the Internet, gives any value to the number of likes your page has. Even marketers who care about the number of followers on a page know that Facebook likes are a faulty metric. Increasing that number, alone, does nothing for you.

Meanwhile, you get a lot of people following you who don’t care about the posts you make. They may never even see those posts; after all, they have thousands of followed pages, all competing for the space on their never-used news feed. Even if they see your posts, are they going to read them? Of course not!

Oh, and there’s just no way they’re going to turn the $5 they’re paid per week and turn that into a purchase of your $200 training course.

You Dilute Your Message

Facebook shares your posts, mostly, with the people who are interested and engaged with your brand. Every person who sees your post then becomes a vector for it to be shared and spread. Facebook also throws in an element of chance, showing your post to a selection of random users, giving them the opportunity to become engaged users to see your posts more often.

Every person who sees your post is a potential person who will share it. Now imagine that the majority of your followers are fake. Most of the people who see your post, then, won’t care about it. They won’t share it. Any chance of going viral you had died. You’re left with conversion rates in the low fractions of fractions of percents.

So yeah, buying likes is worth it, if your end goal is to completely destroy any viability your Facebook account has.