Reducing the cost of the acquisition of new likes is the ultimate goal of every advertiser using Facebook Ads to improve his page’s number of friends. However this search for cheap Facebook likes is often pushed too far, and what may seem like a great achievement is, in fact, just a waste of money.
Yesterday I happened to see one of these cases where, what I would describe as a shady tactic, was used to gather a huge amount of likes on a Facebook Page. What’s worse is that the technique was used by a Social Media Agency, which should be aware of how useless this kind of action is. Let me share it with you, it all started when I saw this Ad:
Very basic but effective. When you’re promoting 
broad interest stuff, doing an ad like this usually results in a high CTR and Like rate. The ad is clearly targeted to men … and we like cool cars. There’s nothing long or confusing to read, just a call to action: Like It ! I can assure you it works. We did an ad like this months ago for a Book page and the top performing ads said things such as: “Love reading ? Like PAGEX now !”. There’s nothing strange about that at first, just a well designed ad to get cheap Facebook likes. But, if you look at the Ad you’ll notice something strange. In the social part of the Ad it says that 65,799 people like Butterfly Networking … What ? Wasn’t this ad about Cool Cars ? Here’s where it starts to get spammy.
After clicking on the ad I ended up on this landing page. It’s a very generic Facebook Tab prompting the user to like the page. It’s not great design execution, but it’s generic enough to work with any kind of ad. They’ve surely done more ads like the one I’ve seen for different targets. I’d not be surprised if they were running other ads like: “Fashion dresses” for women, etc.
Of course I didn’t like the page ! I just clicked on the title to discover what this was really about. Here’s the answer:
That’s great … they are willing to assist Small businesses in improving their social media strategy ! I’m sure they’ll assist them very well … if by ‘social media’ they mean increasing the number of likes with no consideration for engagement or real business results. Without a doubt they’re really good at increasing the number of likes, otherwise how could you explain the 65.808 likes on their page !
Well that’s it … if you don’t care about real results and just want cheap facebook likes, now you know how to get them. Let’s summarize what you have to do:
- Create very generic Facebook Ads about something your targets will surely love: Fast cars, hot women, cats, etc.
- Create them as normal website Ads, not as Page Ads and direct the url to a custom-crafted landing page. That way you can insert a custom Ad Title, otherwise you’d have to use your Facebook page’s real name.
- Possibly target countries where CPC is very cheap (East Europe, South America, India, etc.) … we don’t care if they even speak our language nor if they’ll ever become customers … we just want the number of likes to go up, right ?
- Create a landing tab on your page, a very generic one that just prompts the user to like it.
- Enjoy and watch a meaningless number go up !
I do understand perfectly why they’re doing this. They want to go to their prospects and show them how good they are, since they have more than 65k fan. The customer obviously won’t understand what’s really behind that number, they’ll only think they’re really good and hire them. I understand it, but I don’t agree with it. It’s basically lying to your customer, nothing more.
Remember, Facebook marketing is not about a number. It’s about people. Engaging them, talking with them, and turning them into loyal customers. It’s much better to have 100 likes from people who really care about what you’re doing than 100.000 likes from people living in another country, convinced they’ve just liked a page about cats while they’ve actually just liked a page about selling fur.
If you want to get cheap likes with Facebook Ads, you should fine-tune your campaigns. Find the perfect message and the perfect audience to show it to. There are no tricks or shortcuts. Just lots of work and analysis. Hopefully with AdEspresso we can make these tasks easier for you.
Very insightful post and I see this happening all the time. I believe this type of tactic would definitely show up in a low engagement rate. Having millions of followers and only able to get a hundred or so people to share/like/comment on your posts to me is a clear indicator that your followers are not targeted and uninterested in your product/company.
Nice post Massimo. The other issue is that the half life of likes obtained with this kind of tactic is low as many will unlike when they see your content clogging up their news feed and unlike. If others never engage with your content, then Edgerank will render you invisible to them over time anyway. I get the numbers game too and agree it is a low ROI proposition overall. Thanks for sharing.
I can’t help but notice how well this page is optimized for “cheap Facebook likes”
Eheheh David ! Nothing wrong with some SEO optimization ! At least it’s not well optimized for “Cool cars”
Good post and example, there are definitely a lots of spammy ads out there. I think the quality of these likes is almost as worst as the “fake facebook profile” ones you can buy out there.