What’s Wrong with Buying Facebook Fans?

Many websites and services nowadays let fan page owners buy Facebook fans from them. These websites all promise the same thing- guaranteed Facebook fans who are real people to your fan page. Considering the average profit of a Facebook fan is $136 (study by Syncapse), this appears like an easy solution to have an astounding ROI (return on investment) for your business.

It seems like a magic pill that you can buy Facebook fans nowadays. Finding fans is one of the hugest challenges regarding Facebook fan pages. The truth is that the majority of these services are not legitimate at all. I know this from experience with dealing with a lot of fan suppliers. As a result, I’m pretty familiar with the whole buy Facebook fans community. When we first offered our Facebook services, we tried out fan packages of 1k to 5k fans. We turned to suppliers who were overseas in India, Pakistan and Singapore.

They all assured me that their fans were 100% real. They would be 100% real, targeted people. Targeted means they are all from a certain country such as the United States or Australia. I went ahead to try out their services and offer them to our clients.

The fan quality was complete garbage. We've gone through many suppliers and not a single one gave us real fans. The ones who did provide real Facebook fans did so by a technique known as clickjacking. They were using a code that MADE people become fans of a page. Our clients would see horrible message on their walls like, "How did I become a fan of this crap?!". When you buy Facebook fans, you end up with a lot of fake fans.

Yes, almost every service guarantee 100% "real fans". I tested a ton of these. These fans look like real people when you first see them. They have different profile pictures and lots of friends. But when I looked more carefully, It turned out these people were also fake. They all had identical profile formats, indicating they were being auto-generated by a bot. And when I messaged them, I never got any responses.

And there were some suppliers who took my money and never delivered.
I soon concluded that having fake fans or uninterested fans does nothing for your business. Some might argue that they provide social proof. However, this is only partly true. A ton of fans make it look like that lots of people like your page. Yet, when a user lands on your page, sees that you have 2000 likes, but no one writing on your wall, what will they think? They'll instantly lose trust in your business. They may even know that you are buying facebook fans.

I’ve actually surveyed business owners and asked them if it was a good decision to buy Facebook Fans. Most of them said that the fans were completely worthless! There was not any increase in activity or sales after buying facebook fans. Perhaps there are businesses that offer real fans who may actually be interested in what your fan page has to offer. But doubt they would be charging anything less than $250 for 1000 fans.