There are a lot of reasons why you might want to identify the fake followers of a Facebook page. You’ll note that I said identify, not find out if they exist. That’s because every Facebook page is going to have some fake users. It’s just a fact of marketing on Facebook these days. Show
Where do fake likes come from? Why do they exist? How can you spot them? To find that out, let’s start at the beginning. Types of Fake FollowersIf you’ve been following this blog for a while, you would know that we’ve established a few categories for fake followers when we discuss them. I do this primarily because there’s a blurred line between fake followers and just bad followers. There’s very little difference, functionally, between someone who followed you for a contest but doesn’t care about your posts any more, and someone whose account is managed by a robot. Neither one engages with your posts or cares about your brand, and neither one is going to click your links or buy your products. It’s just that one is easier to identify and remove. Before we get into the categories, I just want to point out that Facebook has a fairly good handle on fake followers. There are a lot of them out there, sure, but the turnover rate is quite high. Facebook purges hundreds or thousands of fake accounts every day, and no one notices. Only when there’s a significant number removed from a specific page do you get the “We’ve removed some fake likes” notice. The categories basically are divided based on the origin and purpose of the account.
There are additional sub-categories for each. For example, with bots, you might have bots designed just to like pages, or bots made to send spam messages or make spam posts, or bots designed to provide fake engagement. There are also some fake accounts made for impersonating others, but those don’t tend to be run by robots. Why Fake Followers ExistFake followers don’t make you money when they like your page. They don’t click links, they don’t convert, they don’t share posts, and they don’t buy products. Facebook doesn’t approve of them and removes them when they’re spotted. So why do they exist? The answer, of course, is money. As long as there are people out there willing to pay a Russian scammer $10 for 1,000 likes, there will be scammers with botnets selling those likes. Let’s face it; it’s trivially easy to set up a rotating proxy list to make fake email addresses and use those to sign up for fake Facebook accounts. With a bot, you can make hundreds per hour. Since we can’t cut off the source, and it’s inefficient to filter every account as its made and hope to catch the fakes, the best we can do is try to educate all of you out there and get you to buy your likes from legitimate services, if at all. Only by removing demand can we stop the epidemic. How You Get Fake LikesContrary to popular belief, fake likes are not solely the domain of like sellers. There are legitimate like sellers, like ourselves, who run ad campaigns with audiences you can’t normally reach. The likes you get there are perfectly valid, not fake. By contrast, fake likes can come from anywhere. Bots can find a Facebook like box on your website and like you through it. Running Facebook ads will get you fake likes. Buying ultra-cheap likes will most likely get you fakes as well. Clickfarm workers are even encouraged to organically like pages just to further hide their coordinated activity. If you do anything at all on Facebook, chances are you’re going to get some fake likes. It’s just a fact of life now. The best you can do is keep on top of it. Identifying Fake Likes on Other PagesThere are a lot of ways to identify fake followers on Facebook. I’m starting out with the methods you can use to identify the presence of fake likes on someone else’s page, because all of these methods can apply to you as well. The ones that apply just to you, though, require access an outsider wouldn’t have. Keep that in mind; any technique here can be used on you the same way you can use it on someone else.
One thing you can’t count on as an identification is engagement rates. Just because a page has a ton of followers doesn’t mean they’ll have high engagement rates. Heck, on Twitter, Katy Perry has over 80 million followers, but only gets 5,000 retweets average on each post. That’s a .0000625% engagement rate. Engagement rates vary wildly from post to post and from business to business. Identifying Fake Likes on Your PageThere’s not a lot you can do with admin access that you can’t do publicly. The big thing is checking into your Facebook Insights. Check for strange demographic spikes, like a sizable presence in a country outside of your business area. If you can only accept payment from people in America, you don’t care about any follower from India, they do you no good. Another thing you can do is drill down into your actual audience. You can’t see a full listing of your followers, Facebook prohibits that, but you can see a list that expands a few times before it stops showing you anyone new. Look for those characteristics of fake users, as I’m specifying now. Characteristics of Fake LikesFake profiles tend to share a few similarities. The number one red flag, of course, is if the profile has no posted information. A blank account is a valueless account, so never feel bad about removing them. The second red flag is if the account has thousands of liked pages. Very few real people have more than a few hundred liked pages, and when they do, they still rarely top 1,000. Meanwhile, clickfarm users and bots will tend to have thousands of liked pages. Be extra skeptical of accounts that have locations from areas that don’t matter to your business. Whether this is out of state people for a small local business, or out of country people for national businesses, the idea remains the same. You might purge some real users if you nuke everyone outside of your business area, but if they can’t buy from you anyways, it’s not necessarily a big loss. Plus, if they really like your brand, they’ll come back again. Another warning sign is if the account happens to be a stereotypically hot young woman, usually with a provocative picture as a profile picture. They may or may not have a cover photo with more of the same. Often, these accounts are spambots looking to build a friends list they can then sell advertising space on. They’re taking advantage of sex appeal to get men with more hormones than sense to add them as a friend. Speaking of profile images, you can generally confirm by running a reverse image search – Tineye or Google’s image search can both work – to find other places where the picture was posted. If the same profile picture is used on a dozen different Facebook accounts with different names, you either found an international criminal mastermind or a bunch of bots using stock photos or Googled pictures as their profile pictures. My money is on the latter. Removing Fake LikesWhen you want to get rid of fake likes on Facebook, all you need to do is go to their profile and click to remove them. It’s a very simple process, but it takes a lot of work to lead up to it. Facebook doesn’t make it easy to see a list of your followers, and they make it even harder to remove them in bulk. Unfortunately, there’s no good automatic way to remove followers, nor is there an app or API you can use to do it for you. This is the process I use, slow as it is.
At the end of the day, Facebook really puts a barrier between you and any sort of mass follower audits. It’s sad, when Twitter has such easy detection, and other sites allow full lists of followers. Still, you have to make the best out of what you have. How can I increase Fake likes On Facebook?8 easy tips to get more likes on Facebook. Start with strong social marketing fundamentals.. Know what your audience wants to see.. Know when your audience is active.. Stay up-to-date with Facebook trends.. Pin a popular post.. Work with Facebook influencers.. Take advantage of cross-promotion.. Run ads.. How can I get fake likes on my Facebook page for free?Best apps to get free likes on facebook. MyFbLiker.. Fast Liker.. Liker App.. Mg Liker.. Social Liker.. Apentalcalc.. Instaboost.. RiteForge.. Why is my Facebook page getting fake likes?How and why inauthentic likes are generated. There are four primary ways that fake likes are generated: Click farms in which individuals with real accounts on Facebook are paid to manually like specific Pages. Fake accounts that do not represent real people and are generated for the primary purpose of liking Pages.
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