Why You Need Facebook Ads to Rule Your Business World – Like Farming VS Like Building

As you have scrolled through your Facebook feed, you’ll be familiar with the posts you have been subjected to because friends or families have chosen to ‘share’ or ‘like’ a particular Facebook page. Does ‘1 like = 1 prayer’ ring any bells? Now we all know and understand that 1 like does not equal 1 prayer, however, at some stage or another we have all pressed ‘like’ because at the end of the day it’s not hurting anyone, or is it? Enter ‘Like Farming’, a scam which continues to sweep through Facebook and continues to gain momentum.

Like Farming is when a scammer, generally around competitions, tries to convince users to like a specific Facebook page. These users can be you and I, or more likely, they are fake users, otherwise known as ‘ghosts’, who have created Facebook profiles for the single use of liking these Facebook pages and then abandoning the ghost profile they created. Once the Facebook page has a large number of likes, which can be anywhere upwards of 10,000, the scammer sells the Facebook page to a business to be repurposed and rebranded. The people behind these pages are up for big money and will often sell these Facebook pages off or use them to spread malware for monetary gain.

It’s not only an issue for users who could unsuspectingly be exposed to malicious malware, but it also poses a dilemma because the likes which are generated by the ‘ghosts’ are fake and empty. Once the Facebook page has gained the quota of likes it needs, it is sold, bought and then rebranded; the likes the initial scam accumulated are then attached to something else entirely, which means the Facebook users who initially and genuinely liked the picture of the child with cancer for ‘1 like = 1 prayer’, are then exposed to something else entirely. As for the fake ‘ghost’ profiles that are now abandoned, the likes these profiles ticked are essentially empty as there is no true audience here.

Like Farming gives the appearance that you have a massive amount of people interested in your business. It isn’t something that has broken into the Australian market heavily, but has slowly started creeping in during 2014. It impacts more than just the businesses buying them, as the people who like the pages are subjected to all sorts of tricks to get them to like the page. Once you like them, the scammer can serve you ads and deliver malware, third party product ads and more.

Like Farming will get you likes and get them fast, however these likes will not be targeted and most will likely be ‘ghosts’. So in actual fact the businesses which purchase a Like Farming Facebook page, will not be reaching an audience anyway. You might be asking yourself, ‘what’s the point?’ and we agree.

The key is to build you Facebook likes organically, and this is called Like Building. It is used for legitimate Business Facebook pages to build likes in a more organic way, using targeted ads that can be aimed at specific demographics, interests, locations and more. This allows a business to gain a real audience that is actively interested in their product or services. It’s obviously the slower of the two options, though this will depend on the budget you have. More importantly, this method will ensure that you get real likes, not fake ones, and it does not support scammers.

As a SME, the biggest mistake you can make with your Facebook advertising is not targeting. Most self-run ‘Like Building’ campaigns we seem to have come across here at SponsoredLinX have been too broad and the SME hasn’t realised you can include specifics such as customers’ interests and locations. SMEs also have the option to show ads in specific areas of Facebook and, even show ads to people with certain mobile operating systems. So think before you click next time you’re scrolling through your Facebook news feed, and contact us to speak with our Social Media Expert Lachlan Dann on 1300 859 600 (extension 440) to find out how to properly implement Like Building in your Facebook advertising campaign. Don’t forget click here to register for our Optimise Social Media Webinar Series, ‘How to Build an Empre with Social Media’ too. Our first webinar in the series is titled  ‘Why you Need Facebook Ads To Rule Your Business World’ and will launch on Wednesday 21st January 2015 at 10:30 am AEST. We’ll see you there!

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