Are you eyeing a fanpage you would like to purchase, but you just aren’t sure enough if the likes and activity are real? Season marketers know the ins and outs of this business, however, if you’re just starting out it is quite understandable that you might have reservations, especially with all the fake like providers on the web. This short article will try to answer some of the most common questions people have before they decide to jump the ship.
I am trying to buy a fanpage from someone, however, after checking its history, it seems that it lost many fans over the years. Are the fans fake?
Years ago Facebook was quite easy to manipulate, and there were millions of fake accounts running wild. Since 2010 Facebook got much better at detecting them, and currently it is virtually impossible to manipulate large groups of fake accounts. The amount of money that needs to be involved makes it impractical (software, servers, proxies, developer costs, sim cards for phone verification, etc) and it would literally take five or six digit budgets just to manipulate one average size (100-200k) fanpage. The reason why you might see a drop in likes on some fanpages is because in 2011 Facebook started detecting and deleting fake accounts, and obviously because of this some fanpages took a hit.
Take a look at a price chart (below) from one of the fake like providers on the web.
As you see, the biggest package available is 50,000 fans, and that comes at a staggering price of 1200 USD, with a 90-day delivery rate. Most of providers aren’t able to go over 50k likes, however, if they could let’s do the math to see if faking large fanpages would be profitable for them. 250,000 fans divided by 50k equals 5. Now let’s multiply that five by the ongoing fake fan rate (1,200 USD). We’re looking at a 6000 USD price tag, and considering the amount of time it takes to generate 50k fans we can predict that delivering 250k fans would take close to a year. That price tag is pretty hefty considering that on average fanpages with 250,000 likes (real likes) are generally worth between 400-1500 USD. So you see, from a business standpoint, no one in their right mind would even attempt to manipulate such a big page.
I see a fanpage that I like, but it seems like the activity is dead. The fanpage is huge, so what gives?
In 2013 Facebook made fanpages very impractical, by introducing a very unforgiving algorithm update. You can read more about it here: http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/facebook-marketing/facebook-brand-pages-suffer-44-decline-reach-since-december-1/ This update killed reach on most fanpages, so when you see low likes per post on large fanpages don’t worry, the fans are not fake. It’s just how Facebook works these days. Even popular entities like Forbes are hitting single digit likes on their posts (and they have nearly three million fans). So you see, high fan count does not mean a high amount of likes on every post. These days you need excellent content and have tons of experience to properly engage Facebook users. So make sure you do your homework before you decide to invest into fanpages, to see if you’re capable of surviving in this business.