Let’s go ahead and state the obvious – Facebook is not very business-friendly. Anymore at least.
Pages post content hoping someone will see it without having to click “boost post.” But before that can happen a page has to have people like it.
And boy are pages getting desperate.
Just this week I had a client email wanting to know how a “joke-of-a-competitor” (his words) had 3 times the number of likes he had. Well, the answer was simple – Facebook Like desperation.
You’ve never heard of Facebook Like Desperation?
Facebook Like Desperation (n): The action of lowering yourself or your business to cheap ways to get likes on for your Facebook page just to pad your numbers. Closely related to buying Facebook likes. Different from Facebook ads.
Let me share some examples…
From a local attorney…
LIKE OUR PAGE and COMMENT and be entered to win a $ 50 gift card from !!!
From idiot page managers…
(In regards to the $ 1 billion Powerball) – LIKE MY PAGE and if this is the winning ticket I’ll share it with you!
From clueless page managers…
LIKE, SHARE and COMMENT AND WIN THIS !!!
And then there are the giveaways, sweepstakes, answer- the-question posts, etc. That clog up our newsfeed.
(Note, I did not include the actual images from these posts because I didn’t want to actually call out by name the businesses, their owners and their social media consultant(s).)
I asked the ME Marketing community what some of the shadiest ways they’ve seen Facebook pages attempt get page likes and here are some of the answers –
“Buying them, definitely.”
“Asking people to Like and Share a page in exchange for a portion of lottery winnings. With the Power Ball being so high right now, I’ve seen several of these.”
“Giveaways that never actually happen!”
“”Share/Like” polls on trivial items or bogus contests.”
Businesses and business owners need to stop being desperate for Facebook likes. The posts like the ones above do nothing by junk up our newsfeeds and don’t actually work. Take the attorney example above. The people who liked and shared that page in order to try to win are people who would never hire this attorney. They are, for one, not who he targets, and two, already have respectable local attorneys they already use. So what’s the point in doing something like that when people are only liking your page to win, not because they would possibly hire you one day? Posts/contests like that rarely work and it only does when it’s your own product or service you’re giving away.
What’s worse are pages that run giveaways for likes and then never actually give anything away. Yes, that happens.
You want to be intentional in how you get likes and who you get likes from. You want to target the people who would actually hire you or shop from you. Anyone else is just a waste. Going after cheap likes like that does nothing but cheapen your brand. Likes will come organically or from targeted Facebook ads. Just be patient.
So what are your thoughts? Are pages getting more and more desperate for likes or have I got this totally wrong?
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