Facebook set to remove questionable ‘likes’

Posted on Tags: Social Media

In the past few days, Facebook has announced in a statement that it will be removing questionable likes from fan pages, such as those that have been bulk-bought. If you’d like to find out more about what this Facebook update means for businesses with pages that have ‘fake’ fans, this BBC article sums it up nicely.

It's long been known by internet marketing professionals like ourselves, that some of our rival agencies have been buying Facebook likes and Twitter followers, but to what purpose?

We'd be lying if we said that we hadn’t considered it in the past, but couldn't think of a good enough reason to do it other than to:

1. Fool the client
2. Fool other Facebook users

But that's just fooling ourselves really, isn’t it?

Real fans should engage with a page by liking, sharing and commenting on your content, because they have a genuine interest in what you have to say. Fake fans offer little value other than to make you look more popular.

So today is a good day for people like us, who do things by the book to build long term, quality internet marketing programmes rather than those who have a scant knowledge but are happy to charge for little or no value anyway.

The same applies to search engine optimisation (SEO). There is no quick fix and no direct route to the top of the search engine rankings other than a thought-out, creative and well executed plan of action.

Then results will start to happen and continue happening.

If you’d like to find out more about how to build your Facebook following legitimately and encourage engagement, or alternatively develop a long-term SEO plan, we can help.