Some people are obsessed with the amount of Facebook likes (or Instagram followers or insert social media thing here). I’ve personally always thought it didn’t really matter how many of anything we had so long as these people contributed to the overall community we were trying to create and we had paying customers. (I wrote a blog post about how I truly believe you don’t need infinite customers to survive in business and I still believe that to my core.)

That said, I’ve always wondered would anything terrible happen if we bought likes.

I’ve heard the rumors, that Facebook will do witchy things to your page or your brand would be compromised. But what would happen if, for once, I did take a shortcut?

I did it for science, and I did it for you. (Note if you are a paying client, I’ve never purchased likes for you. I only experiment on my own companies when I do something seemingly risky.)



Methodology

To be fair about comparing the before and after of this, I knew I had to measure what I thought was important. So I decided to look at the following the month before and the month after I sold out:

  • Number of fans- If I buy a set amount, did this change and did it stay changed after I paid the fee? IE not only am I getting what I’m paying for but does it last.
  • Number of interactions on the average post- Would having more likes make my posts more visible/create more exposure?
  • Number of private messages- Did having more likes lead to more potential money?

I did no paid ads or other campaigns to keep the situations as similar as possible.

I went on a website and paid $5 to someone who guaranteed me 500 Facebook likes and had good reviews.

The month before (October 4-November 4, 2017):

Number of fans: 664
Number of interactions on the average post: 120.2 (averaging 15 data points in the Post Reach section of Facebook Insights.)
Number of private messages: None, though three if you count public Facebook comments from people wanting to buy stuff.

This was a pretty typical month honestly.

Then I bought the likes. Can you guess what day I did it?

The month after (November 5 – December 5, 2017):

Number of fans: 1227 (plus 563 net change)
Number of interactions on the average post: (averaging 15 data points in the Post Reach section): 106.7333333333333333333 (you get the idea)
Number of private messages: None though three if you could public Facebook comments from people wanting to buy stuff.

What’s different for me now that we’ve doubled our Facebook audience?

The short answer is… nothing. It makes sense that people who have no idea who we are and liked us to earn the equivalent of $0.05 are going to interact less with us than the 664 people who have stuck with us (as you can see from the graph above) practically forever.

No noticable increase in business inquiries either. No one has even commented on this change in likes so in other words, other people didn’t even notice our new found purchased popularity.

I guess if you have $5 to spend and don’t feel like buying bitcoin, stocks, etc. you could easily buy some fans. Just know that you’re doing it for your ego and not for much else. 

My next experiment might be, if I just post MORE, will these numbers change? But that’s for next time. For now, while you can buy popularity, you can’t buy shortcuts to growing your business. Which I guess you probably knew already.



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