When it comes to social media, Facebook is one of the smartest ways to help you expose your products, services to your customers. The success of a Facebook marketing campaign is measured by the number of “LIKEs” on Facebook. But how valuable is Facebook like? Facebook likes are the way to spread your brand on Facebook. More likes you receive, more people know about your brands, products. Is it true? Yes, it is somewhat true. But Facebook and many Internet Marketers exaggerated the value of Likes. By this way, more and more people are willing to pay a large lump sum of money to hire Internet Marketing experts or at least hiring Virtual Assistant for Internet Marketing oversea (Vietnam, Philippines, India…) to boost, promote likes on their Facebook fanpages. They just forget the ultimate goal is to make people involve and feel interested in your brands or products; and decide to buy your products (in case of Facebook stores). Even Facebook also exploits this chance to earn money. When managing your Facebook fanapge, it is easy to see a link “Get More Likes” with the Facebook’s promise “Connect with more of the people who matter to you”. My fanpage, for example, I paid $100 and the likes rolled in. Within a couple of hours, the number of likes reached 500 from 200 likes. Actually, first I was so delighted with this number of Likes, but I realized that 300 likes were nonsense to me and my business. My business is to provide Virtual Assistant services and some tasks of Internet Marketing; the target customers are in North America, Europe, and Australia. In fact, 300 likes that I just had received were from India, Egypt, Bangladesh, Philippines. These people were so suspicious; they didn’t really feel interested in my fanpage, my services; they just clicked like unawarely. These are FAKE LIKES. Once again, LIKE is very important to Facebook fanpage, not every like has the same value. Likes from people who are in your target customers or target audiences with high engagement with your pages are the most important. I think I would rather have 200 Likes from people who are interested in Virtual Assistant and Internet Marketing than 20000 Likes but only 300 people really interested in Virtual Assistant or Internet Marketing. It is not easy to eliminate fake likes from a Facebook fanpage with thousands like. All you can do is target your audiences or customers and post around them. Do not post something rambling; it will help you acquire more quality engagement and real audience. I wrote this article is not to criticize Facebook or someone who highly value the Facebook likes. All I want is to spread a message that “Like is good, but don’t forget who is the real audiences, real customers”.
From my POV, having plenty of likes actually entice people to like a certain page. But I agree that real followers are more important.
I'm totally agree with you, facebook likes also increase the popularity of website with short interval.
FB's News algorithm also prizes interactions. If your followers aren't interacting with your posts, then future posts are less likely to get seen by your followers.
I'd much rather have a small amount of likes from people who are interested in my niche than a large group of people who have no interest and are only liking the page because I paid them to. I made that mistake, I have almost 1,000 likes on a page and around 900 are people I paid so every time I send a status out I get about 5-20 people looking at it.
Genuine engaged fans are the key to success. So there is no point in buying likes simply for numbers.