Is Buying Friends Legit?
Surely you have heard about how powerful a marketing and advertising vehicle social media can be. Maybe you have created a Facebook fanpage or a Twitter account and posted a few updates. There is one problem though. You don’t have any fans or followers to read your updates! Like most businesses you list of fans and followers will sit at 0 unless you start by advertising and marketing your page. Sure you can invite your friends and family to boost your stats but they are most likely not your targeted demographic. After some research you see that you can literally buy fans for Facebook and followers for your Twitter.
Going straight to the answer about buying fans. The answer is yes and no. It depends on whose services you use. Since the advent of social media advertising and marketing campaigns, paid services have promised to add fans, likes, or followers to your Facebook fanpage and Twitter account by the thousands. Getting hundreds or thousands of new fans in a short period of time is very tantalizing because of the powerful marketing that can be accomplished using social networking sites and other social media outlets. While the market has been flooded with these types of services, very few offer quality results.
Most cheap “buy fans” services are completely illegitimate by creating fake social profiles and having them like your page, become your fan or your follower. Of course these services are basically worthless since you are expecting real people who can become clients to like and view your fanpage to keep in touch. There is some merit to having a large number of people who have already clicked like or followed you. It is mostly a psychological factor that adds to your value by social proof that many others already “like” you. However, this is not the situation most are expecting when buying fans to increase their social media presence.
Better than the scammers, other services provide real people who will like and follow you with a caveat. These people are offered an incentive to become your fan, follower, or like your page. While now we have real people in our social circle, there is no more incentive for the to return. They became your fan, got their download, and are well on their way, never to visit your fanpage again. This is only slightly better than the scammers. We do have real fans now but they probably weren’t interested in us in the first place, they just performed the action to get the incentive.
Finally, we have services that offer real people who voluntarily sign up for your page with no strings attached. These rare services provide exactly what we want, real fans who really like our page. There are several methods used to bring a drove of people to your Facebook fanpage or Twitter account but the most widely used legitimate method involves displaying your page to visitors of other sites as a placement or ad. Instead of forcing the user to like your page, it is merely presented to user who can dismiss it or (hopefully) follow it. Just as most ad services, these can be placed contextually and targeted to a specific demographic. This gives your business real people who want to follow you and read your updates.
