Facebook “Like” and the Twitter follower have created a universe of online marketing opportunities for companies.
These popularity generation tools help to gain exposure among other social network users and, in theory, increase sales of products and services. Inevitably, an industry has been created in the sale of Facebook’s likes and followers of Twitter to companies that can’t get them fast enough through real popularity.
A monitoring of social networks is a powerful force. Genuinely won, it is a support and commitment with a relevant audience of potential clients and customers. The viral nature of social networks means that the reach of a person such as, particularly of a well-connected person, can extend to many thousands.
Buying followers on social networks is a grim and dead-end activity, and yet many companies are tempted and many providers who use automatic botnets can be found at Google and other classified services. Google explicitly prohibits website owners from paying for back links. Facebook and Twitter do not seem to mention it in their terms and conditions, but common sense says that they will not like it and run the risk that your account will be suspended if they discover it.
How do these botnets work?
Many wonder on Facebook and the global membership of Twitter. A significant proportion of the accounts could be false.
Secondary companies operated by trading people with low Internet life on Facebook and Twitter accounts on a large scale. They get the poor people of the developing countries (Bangladesh, Vietnam and the Philippines, in particular) to create thousands of accounts, complete with photos and publications. They even get these accounts verified by phone. Black hat marketing companies buy these accounts for a few cents each and then use the software to “like” or follow their customers’ accounts by thousands.
Should you do it?
The ethical question aside (which is often enough to dissuade most people), the debate about how well the purchase of followers on social networks works is continuous. A large fan base of Facebook or Twitter followers can seem impressive and encourage genuine people to do so because it seems to be popular and established.
Companies are often tempted to try it because it is fast and relatively cheap to do so. An investment of £ 100 could buy you thousands of followers and followers and send your perceived popularity at full speed overnight.
The significant risk, however, beyond the fact that these followers are useless to their business in their own right, is that Facebook or Twitter could close their account, or perhaps more likely close the accounts of their spurious followers, which means that Its popularity falls and its investment is lost overnight.
For true popularity, you need real Likes. For a startup business, it might be tempting to have thousands of fans and I like it and could even give it a boost in the short term. However, this does not make sense as a long-term strategy. At some point, your real fans will notice that most of your followers are strangely silent. If they discover what you have done, it could ruin your reputation with them. Concentrate on winning real followers: you’ll be glad you did it in the end.
