Unfortunately what you’re doing here is ruining things for those that follow you. Right now ‘buying’ fans may make things look legit, but only until people catch on. It’s crying wolf and it devalues the hard work of those of us that engage with our communities and build a fan base the legitimate way.
I see what you’re saying and I don’t disagree. Let’s take a real life example. When new night clubs open up they usually hire club promoters to bring people to the club so it looks like a cool place. Some other people come to, and hopefully have a good time to stay, but most are just there for the first time and never come again. Is that unethical? What I did starting out was exactly that, just a lot cheaper and a lot easier. Now club facebook page and club twitter page are hopping on their own without promotion.
That’s an entirely different scenario. Yes, club promoters will hire people to go out and promote club nights and get people through the doors, but this is nothing more than marketing and advertising; two things that one can do to similar effect with their own websites.
A more accurate metaphor would be running a restaurant and giving your family and friends free food if they sit there all day and make the place look packed. The restaurant may be busy, but people feel the difference between a busy, successful restaurant and one that doesn’t have the customers to look busy, and if anything they feel uncomfortable eating there if they’re not part of the “group”.
I disagree. I think Blarko777’s nightclub analogy is right on the money. Rightly or wrongly, people like to hang out where they think their voice will be heard.
I personally don’t see anything wrong with Blarko777 getting things moving in the right direction by forking out for 1000 (or more) followers/fans. Many large corporates and organizations are, albeit at times unwittingly (particularly when they outsource their online marketing), doing exactly the same thing!
At the same time, I’m not saying (and I don’t believe Blarko777 is intimating) that purchasing fans/followers is the ultimate and final step in building a social media presence. If anything, it is the first of many steps.
If the fans / followers that come after this initial injection are real (and Blarko777 puts in the significant groundwork that will be necessary for his pages to gain traction) then there’s no harm done!
Anyone who thinks that they’re not being gamed on facebook/twitter (and other social media platforms) needs to have a more careful look at some of the pages they currently interact with.
I fully support Blarko777’s moral obligation to feed his/her family. And I certainly believe this outweighs any obligation he/she has to fall in line with the self-gratifying views of sitepoint’s ethical purists.
Keep working hard Blarko777. Feed your family. All power to you!
Thanks :). The website has been growing steadily the past 6 months and we are getting real followers and fans. We now have 2,000 legitimate fans and followers on each that are tweeting and posting away 
I also not interested in buy and sell. friendship can make the thing well.
Actually “buying fans” or promoting something to get fans is crucial when your business is in a starting mode.
Customers will feel more confident buying from you if you have at least hundreds of fans.
After that point, it’s more important to get fans that likely will interact with your page (like or comment).
Promotion and purchase are very different.
If you advertise your page to get in front of potential fans (those who know you or not) you can bring in people who participate.
100 fans is not a magic number. 10,000 is not. Unlike say user reviews (where honesty is essential), most people will not see, or care about the number of fans, but rather the engagements.
What you need is 100, 500, 5,000 people who are active enough to make a post turn into a dialogue, otherwise you’ve got a number but nothing happening for people to believe in you or want to participate with you.
It’s true what you say here. Still I have a lot of sites that don’t have a like button … so no fans on Facebook. Still a lot of sales.
I’m saying: if you don’t display people won’t know / care that you don’t have fans.
Also: I look at the product and what can do for me not at how many buy it.
Your goal is getting fans to participate in your Facebook fan page. Nothing wrong with that. Any fan admin page should try various ways to trigger that. Upload cool image, give something free as a contest prize.
My goal is getting the good first impression when new visitors visiting my e-Commerce site (not my Facebook fan page). In my opinion showing you have hundreds of fans is much better than showing you have 10 fans. Same thing as showing you have a SLL certificate from Verisign better than showing you have a certificate from GoDaddy.
Actually I do not want the new visitors to click on my Facebook fan. I want them to buy something from my e-Commerce site. I will try to get them to be a fan later through email campaign.
Actually, my goal is to leverage social tools ideally on brand websites to create affinity, authenticity and harnass the power that is viral marketing to drive a longer customer relationship for my customer’s companies.
Having people talking, reviewing and contributing whether it’s via a page like, a product like, a user review, comment drives my client’s businesses further.
If you’re showing that elsewhere and need a little bigger fan count there’s lots of ways to do that that are more relevant than a service but that’s apples and oranges.
We’re in similar shoes and what I’m suggesting, in my experience running some mid to large brand and etailer social programs after years of running traditional online advertising ones, is that if you get more conversation on your site [not simply on some third party platform] you’ll see results. The goal is not to see how many conversations we can get, it’s to see how we can use those conversations to drive our business and the mechanics for making that happen are different than with traditional advertising.
P.S. Great discussion. Appreciate you keeping the dialogue going and hopefully more members will jump in!
yes slow n steady always win the race it definitely will consume a lot of your time to build up the community but it worth waiting the followers that you will have then would be more loyal n will become your permanent customer
I think not all of people satisfied with buying fans, followers, ect. But my experience I really feel the benefit of it. So, just how you can find the right place to buy.
What exactly is the benefit you “feel”? How do you measure it?
customers came. You can try to build your business by create facebook fan page, and buy or get a fans.
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I’m locking this thread as the main discussion seems to have run it’s course and posts now are mostly off topic. If you have a new question or comment please open a thread on it.