Fake fans are guaranteed to hurt your social media and search engine rankings. Buying fake fans is a mistake.

Getting rid of those pesky fake fans will allow your posts to be seen by real people who have liked your page and want to hear from you.

Buying Fake Fans

Whether you’re using Facebook or Instagram, every Business Page needs fans. When Facebook first began, your post was shown to every single one of your fans–that means your posts reached 100% of your friends (and fans)! When Facebook went public and investors expected a return on their investment, Facebook began limiting who, and how many, of your own fans saw your posts, based on a complicated and ever-changing algorithm. Yes, they limit who sees your posts. Creepy, isn’t it?

In 2021, it’s guesstimated that about 1% to 2% of your fans will see your post in their newsfeed.

How do you reach the other 98%? You can either “Boost a Post” or create a “Facebook Ad”. Boosts and ads are promotions you create to run for a certain amount of days and a finite budget. You could spend as little as $1 buck a day or a million a year! Why run boosts and ads? To reach your fans! That’s right. Unless you spend money on Facebook, the likelihood of your fans seeing your posts is only 1% to 2%. The investors make money when you spend money and the return for your spend is that you now get to reach a higher percentage of your own fans.

Paying to reach your own fans is what going public did to your Facebook Business Page.

Now, let’s remember that Facebook owns Instagram, so if you run an ad on Facebook, it can also appear in Instagram. In fact, there are 14 places where your FB ad will appear but that’s a whole other blog.

Let’s get back to those fake fans. Many business owners have decided that when creating a Facebook Business Page the best way to show they’re credible is to have a high number of fans. They decide to buy fans. They Google a few words and voila! they come up with a list of some companies who will sell you names of fake fans for as little as $100 for 5000 fans. Don’t do it! There are other ways to bust through that algorithm than buying fake fans! (Tip: Write robust, relevant, fresh, compelling, optimized posts with high-quality and intriguing photos and write emotionally touching convertible copy!)

What is a fake fan? Regardless of where you live, a fake fan could be malware, compromised accounts, or deceived users, or simply they’re fake profiles with a generic profile photo, no posts, no activity, no friends, and a profile that shows they’ve liked and followed a disproportionate number of business pages. RED FLAG ALERT! So, what’s wrong with that? Everything.

Let’s do a little math. If you buy have some “real” fans and you buy 5,000 more fans, that means your “real” fans will never see your posts because the fake fans are in their way. Fake fans can’t engage with posts (commenting, sharing, reacting) either.

It’s better to have 100 real fans and followers than 5,000 fake fans.

Who Really Sees My Posts?

Remember how I wrote that Facebook decides who can see your posts? Here’s the deal. The more you engage with posts from your friends or businesses, the more likely Facebook will show you their posts. If you wonder why you haven’t seen posts from your best friend on Facebook, it’s probably because you see the posts but you just scroll on by and never engage. By engaging, I mean reacting, commenting or sharing it.

So, engage! And be engaging!

If you have a business page, when a fan or follower SHARES your post, that’s the gold star of success, because now their fans can engage, comment on and share your post to their followers! When Facebook sees this “affinity” between friends and businesses, they will show you more of those posts. Re-read this paragraph.

Most importantly, if a fan SHARES your post, that’s the gold star of reality, because now their fans can engage, comment, and share your post with their friends and when Facebook sees that happening, you’ll see more of the posts you want to see. Re-read this sentence.

Who Are My Fans?

If you want to know where your fans are from geographically:

• Open your FB Business Page
• Click Insights
• Click People
• Scroll down a bit and you’ll see where your fans are from, their age range, and gender, and primary language. Uh oh, you’ve just discovered that most of them are from another country.

How to Get Rid of Fake Fans

I have a client who bought 4,200 fake fans from Turkey. He said he thought a ‘high number of fans’ would give him more credibility.

I explained the concept of engagement and told him that with 4,200 fake fans, it was unlikely that his posts were reaching his legitimate fans.

In the first week, I posted daily on his Facebook page and not one person engaged. Posting continued in the second week and yes, the content was relevant, interesting, and sometimes even funny. The third week I posted the words, “Is anyone reading this post?” The Facebook insights showed that it reached 625 fans but not one single fan replied to it with a comment. Red flag.

In the 4th week, I began dumping the fake fans and here’s how I did it and you can, too.

• Go to Settings
• Click  People and other Pages
• Next, click  People who like this page and a list of names appears.
• Depending on your computer, you can hover over the person’s name to view a brief biography.
• To remove someone, click the box next to the person’s name and in the upper right corner, there’s a small gear icon that you need to click on.
• Click  REMOVE FROM PAGE LIKES
  • Don’t click Ban From Page. I’ve learned that blocking keeps them in an archived list. Choose remove.

The bad news is that you can only do this one fan at a time. Imagine how long getting rid of 4,200 fake fans took me. And how much it cost him!

In the 5th week, I began boosting posts and buying ads and targeting them to a whole new audience of fans. We finally got some ACTION in the form of Likes! Loves! Happy Faces! Comments! and Shares!

As of today, my client’s fans number at 1,150 and they are all real people.

Good luck and please call me if I can help in any way.

Jules Marie, 303-478-7863, Certified Social Media Strategist

www.33Words.us