Everyone knows how to buy Facebook Likers. How to artificially boost your Liker count by purchasing Likers is the worst kept secret in Social Media. A quick Google search produces hundreds of results. Take a look at BoostLikes.com. You can get 10,000 likers in 10 days for just $120. Now that’s impressive!

The Problems with Purchased Likers

#1 The Likes are not from Real People

This may seem obvious but all those profiles are computer generated or they have IT sweatshops in Bangladesh who manually make these profiles. No one ever logs into these profiles. That well crafted post you hoped would go viral due to all your new likers won’t go anywhere because you literally posted it to a bunch of ghost profiles.

#2 It’s Really Easy to Spot when you Purchase Fake Likers

These profile are really easy to spot. Here are some signs:

• The names will sound strange i.e. Smith Josh, Tanner Amber, etc…
• The number of pages the fake profile “Likes” will usually be the same as other fake profiles who like your page. Image the odds of 100 different people liking the exact same pages. Hmmm….
• The pictures are usually glamour shots of young men and women.

My best guess is that they scrape pictures from dating sites like OkCupid or PlentyofFish and then get a CSV file with lists of Caucasian first and last names and then randomly mix them together.

Additionally, when these companies add the new Likers, they do it in a way that is so blatant, anyone watching your Liker count (clients & competitors) will know what you are doing immediately:

• They add hundreds or thousands new Likers in 24 hours
• They forget to use a United States based IP address to create the profile so the Liker is attributed to the foreign (country where the IT sweat shop is located)

The providers I used could not slow down the pace of Liking a page so there would always be an abnormal spike in Likers i.e. 1 or 2 new Likers every day for a month and then suddenly 500+ new ones on a single day. That’s just dumb.

To combat this abnormal pattern, I tried to order the smallest number of likers possible and then would execute multiple orders a month. That did not work. You could easily see the spikes. No matter how much I offered, they would not add a pause between Likers so the pattern looked natural.

Even though you may specify US based Likers in your order and each profile says they are from the United States, the Liker provider often forgets to create these profiles using a VPN (virtual private network). A VPN can mask the IP address of a user. This is how the profiles generated overseas look like they are from right here in the USA. This is why when you look at the stats for a Facebook page and you see the most popular city as say Jarkata or Cairo, it’s because they screwed up and did not mask their IP address.

#3 You Just Wasted Money

People will often think that no one will Like an un-liked page. To a certain extent a crowd attracts a crowd. It takes a lot of hard work and skill to organically grow a following. But, this purchased following makes your half-assed social experiment look worse because you now have thousands of Likers and still no one is liking or commenting on posts.

Think of it this way, it would be like going to the Super Bowl and no one but the players were making noise. No cheering, no jeering, or merriment. Just stone cold silence in the presence of all those “people”. Most importantly, people like your page because they like your content not by the size of your e-following.

Bottom line, do not buy Likers. It’s too easy to spot the manipulation and you aren’t going to get more exposure or sales because of it. If you want to waste money sit down at a slot machine in Vegas. At least you’ll get a free drink or two out of it.