Buying followers for social media: the Pros and Cons, and what you need to know

Companies selling instant Follower or Liker boosts have been around almost since the dawn of social media itself. In the early days, we assumed that these companies would die out as users got more sophisticated and more able to spot those accounts whose “popularity” was entirely faked.  That hasn’t proven to be the case at all; in fact, the industry in fake followers seems to be thriving.

So, can buying followers ever help a business be successful on social media? Are all bought followers the same? What are the implications on the different sites of boosting your account in this way? We know you’re wondering:  here are the answers!

What am I buying?

First of all, it’s important to recognise exactly what you’re buying when you purchase followers. In the vast majority of cases, you’re gaming the number that appears in your account bio – your number of Twitter or Instagram Followers, or Facebook Likers.  The number itself will be bigger, but that is the limit of the benefit you’re getting. The accounts won’t belong to real consumers in any normal sense.

The basic level – bargain basement followers

The organisations selling these followers, often based around “click farms” in parts of the world where labour is extremely cheap, have hundreds of people setting up fake accounts constantly.

The “quality” of those accounts (ie, the effort they’ve gone to to make the account look like a real user) varies from the “egg avatar with randomly generated name” type through to those which would stand up to some very brief scrutiny – that is, they have an avatar pic, something written in more-or-less coherent English in their biographies, and a handful of generic and usually nonsensical posts.

Once you have paid for the number of followers you want, the supplying company will just follow your account with the purchased quota of fake accounts. You should NOT have to supply your password in order for this to happen!

Here are the pros and cons of this cheap’n’cheerful approach:

Pros:

• These accounts will generally continue to follow you, as they’re not being used by real people;
• They make your account, particularly at a quick glance, look more popular than it actually is.

Cons:

• To anyone who bothers to look, it’s usually totally obvious when an account has purchased these followers.
• Apart from the sudden jump in numbers, the accounts themselves just scream “fake” in terms of their meaningless biographies and nonsense posts.

Below is a perfect example of a fake follower account on Instagram. Implausible name – check. Meaningless biography – check. Incoherent and random posts (and only a few of them) – check. Following a high number of people in order to get a few to follow them back – check, and very low ratio of followers to people being followed- check again.

Followers for hire

Another approach that some of the more expensive follower-sellers take, is to incentivise real users to follow your account. This can be just with a payment, or some other kind of incentive such as search credits on a directory site.

Pros:

• As they are actual social media users, there’s a (small) chance that they might read some of your content, and your product or service might happen to be suitable for them;
• They look like real, organically acquired followers to anyone examining the account

Cons:

• As the incentive is for the initial follow, this type of account is likely to unfollow over time as they purge their timelines of content that’s of no interest to them.

The real issue with bought followers

So we’ve looked at the pros and cons of artificially inflating your account’s popularity with different types of users, but of course there are much bigger implications. The only significant, long term benefit of doing this, is that your account looks more popular than it is, which may in turn influence the kind of people who regard that as an important signal. And don’t take a closer look to see who all those thousands of followers are. Therefore, you may gain some followers who wouldn’t otherwise have bothered with you.

The big downside though, is much more potentially significant, and the exact implications vary according to which of the sites you’re buying followers for.

In all cases, the number of additional followers you gain (who are maybe really interested in your product or service) will likely be a small number compared to the number of fake accounts you’ve bought. So you now have a follower base that’s the opposite of what you should be aiming for with social media – engaged advocates who are likely to show a return when you put effort into creating good content.

Now pay us to access those dead end accounts!

And where it really gets bad is if you’re going to do any paid for marketing, which these days is pretty much crucial to your long term strategy.  Twitter and Instagram (to a lesser degree) and Facebook (to a significant degree) all employ algorithms which restrict your access to your own follower base. Putting it simply, there’s no guarantee that a particular piece of content will be seen by all your followers…unless you pay for that to be the case. But unfortunately, none of the sites have a tick box for “just charge me for showing this to my *real* followers“. So you’re stuck with forever paying to show posts to that big set of fake accounts , in order to get to the handful of genuinely interested followers who are mixed in with them.

On Facebook, the situation is significantly worse. Being able to recruit your keenest and happiest customers to your Facebook page, and then market to them *and their friends*, is the real marketing gold. The social network of your existing customers is a wonderfully self-filtering group of people who are much more likely to also enjoy your product, than the average person picked off the street.

As soon as you buy followers, not only are you going to end up paying to show your posts to them, but you either have to stop using the “friends of Likers” options or end up paying to put your content in front of all the accounts who are linked to your fake followers, too. Ouch. Expensive, and self defeating.

And putting a dent in your Algorithm results…

In addition, most of the social media sites give your account some kind of a ranking figure (which you won’t ever be able to access) which influences how much priority your content is given in the timelines of your followers. Exactly how the algorithm works is very much a trade secret, but we’re pretty sure that engagement levels will be a big factor. And engagement levels are calculated by comparing your total follower numbers to the number of likes, comments etc you receive on a typical post.

So, if you’ve gained 1,000 followers organically but then become impatient and bought 10,000 more, the next time you post something, even if Jesus and the angel host are personally on your side, your engagement levels are going to look terrible because 10,000 of your followers are never, ever going to engage. So you are effectively handicapping every future piece of content you post.

(Bear in mind, that if you sign up to a social media agency who buys followers for your account, the same will apply – and you won’t necessarily be able to reverse it without binning your account and starting again from scratch….so watch out for providers delivering implausible growth rates!).

Is it ever worth it?

As with most things, there are some circumstances where buying followers could be a valid strategy – and we’re just talking from a marketing effectiveness point of view here, and leaving aside the ethical issues of cheating / misleading the public…

For example, if you need an account to look impressive in the short term, for whatever reason, and have no intention of doing paid for marketing through that account or building on it long term for genuine engagement.

If it’s on a site where you’re not really expecting commercial returns, but are using it just to influence brand perception (Instagram fits that description for some businesses).

If raising your follower numbers is the “be all and end all” for your management then yes, buying followers will accomplish that goal.

But overall, tread very very carefully. Once you have thousands of non-genuine followers mixed in with your hard-won real followers, it’s difficult to go back.

From a brand of this size, this is very significant, for a few reasons. Firstly, because they are acknowledging that misleading practices are widespread – and in our own experience, the beauty industry is at least as bad as any in this respect, maybe worse. Secondly, they are admitting that brands have a role in perpetuating that fraud, by creating the demand that “influencers” respond to.

From a marketing professional perspective, this is fantastic news. If more PRs and brand clients had been making educated decisions about who they pay for influence within the social media ecosystem, we would very likely not be having this discussion at all.

But here we are, and mainly because of the longstanding practice of setting influencer payscales mostly or entirely according to their number of followers, rather than, say, rewarding them with a proportion of any sales resulting from their work. As a consequence, it’s wise to regard any social media account with unaccountably large numbers of followers, or whose every banal uttering on Instagram is met with disproportionate enthusiasm, with great suspicion.

That has had a massive and toxic impact on the whole sector. Clients look at these (literally) unachievable numbers, apparently generated by doing nothing particularly clever or out of the ordinary, and they demand that marketers achieve the same thing for them. Potentially, marketers are put in a position of choosing whether to pay their own mortgages or stick doggedly to doing things the right way – which will pay dividends eventually, but often well after a client has lost patience.  Other social media users ( your would-be Influencers) have to choose between a lucrative push-button option to bulk buy followers, and the slow and arduous route of building a genuine following through creating great content.

Everything gets distorted by those “dishonest business practices” that Keith refers to.  I know we as a business will have lost potential clients in the past, because we don’t have an enormous Facebook following. The reason for that is that we have chosen not to invest in the resources required to build one honestly – ie, ongoing high quality content creation in the social media space. That takes time from good people, and those good people need to be paid, and those costs would have to accrue to the fees we charge our clients. We hope that our potential clients will look beyond those particular numbers, take time to chat with us and evaluate our expertise and approach in a more meaningful way – but there’s no doubt that somewhere along the line, some won’t have done. Is there a temptation to cheat the numbers? Of course there is!

The illusion of widespread but inexplicable popularity on social media itself spawns other scams. People who want it to work for them can’t see any explanation for others’ success, which makes them easy prey for practitioners who claim to have a “secret formula” that they can either teach or deploy at will – for a price.  The truth is, there is no secret formula, and success depends on the same basic factors that have been around since God was a boy – understanding your audience, having a great product, consistently generating good quality content that your audience enjoy, and ensuring that you take best advantage of the opportunities for visibility that each platform offers.  Quite often, this news is surprisingly unwelcome…

So where does this leave social media marketing? The thing is, that none of this changes the fundamental uniqueness of what social media marketing can do. There has never been a single, unified communication platform of the size of Facebook or Instagram, since time began. There are real opportunities for effective marketing and laser focused targeting that can’t be found anywhere else, and at a cost which is very hard to equal through other channels.

BUT

As marketers and as clients, we have to be satisfied with “just” those unparalleled opportunities. Stop trying to believe in the unicorns, and take the word “viral” out of your vocabulary (in most cases, at least).

If you’re creating Facebook content which includes a link, and suddenly find that the options to edit the automatically generated preview (the image, title, and description that comes with it) have gone away, you’re not alone. A Facebook “update” which removes this functionality is due to come into force today, 17th July.

What is Facebook Link Preview modification?

When you include a web URL in a Facebook post, the Link Preview is the box that comes up below it showing you how the link will be represented in your final post.  By default, it pulls the content that populates this from the metadata of the originating website.

So, the auto-generated information may or may not be a) attractive or b) accurate, depending on how the site you’re linking to is coded.

Previously, you could click into each of the various areas of the Link Preview and manually edit them to be something more informative.

So, a Link Preview might start off like this:

But you want to tailor that title, description and image to the particular audience you’re addressing, or to highlight one aspect of the article you’re linking to. So your edited version might look like this:

Leading to a published post which looks like this:

Once this function is deprecated (deleted, basically!) by Facebook, you’ll no longer be able to do this.

What we’re seeing as of today is that you can still click into the various areas and edit them, but when you Publish the post, they revert to the metadata. No clues, no error message, not very helpful –  and there will probably be a lot of frustrated social media managers out there today!

Why are Facebook making this change?

According to their own statement, it’s to cut down on misleading previews being posted. So presumably, spammers are creating links to inappropriate or other commercial sites and then editing the link options to make it look as though the link goes to an article very different from the actual content.

It’s a shame that they can’t deal with this issue some other way – for example, allowing people to report misleading posts individually and then banning the creators – but maybe that’s just too resource intensive. Anyway, for now the spammy users are spoiling things for everyone else!

How can I get around it?

If your own website, or the site you’re posting a link to, doesn’t have metadata which is appropriate for creating an attractive auto-preview, there should be a workaround – but it’s likely to involve giving up some of the benefits of the Link Preview function.

This MAY change at the same time as the Link Preview function is altered, but currently, if you upload images to your post PRIOR to pasting in the URL you want to use, Facebook won’t initiate the Link Preview function at all but will just leave your link as a basic, but clickable, text link.  That may be the best way for most users to control this for now; you won’t get as attractive a result as you would with the old function, but at least you won’t have a bunch of messy or irrelevant metadata  getting pulled into your post every time.

It’s also possible that some third party social media tools will create their own workarounds for this in due course, as Facebook’s announcement linked above suggests that the door may be left open for this. As of now, it appears that Hootsuite at least aren’t implementing any alternative . Please feel free to leave a comment if you have a better workaround or have spotted a third party tool which has a better solution!

So far, so standard. Later in the conversation we were talking about “business as usual” social media, and the client was asking at what point they should reduce the Facebook budget and start working on all that engagement and organic growth they’d heard so much about in the past.

At which point, we ran through the usual primer on the Facebook algorithm, and the likely reach they’re going to achieve in 2017 if a post is left to its own, organic, devices.

“But“, said our client “in that case, what is the advantage to me of building that audience? I’m going to be paying Facebook each month in order for anyone to see my content, regardless of whether I’ve recruited any particular prospect to my Facebook page or not“.

Which, we have to say, is a fair point in some ways.

Actually there is an advantage to getting interested prospects to Like your Page, and it is still well worth while doing that: at the very least, when you then pay to boost a post to your existing Likers, you at the very least know that close to 100% of those seeing it should have some interest. Whereas using any other method of targeting it’s a “best guess” as to how likely any individual user meeting those criteria is to be interested in what you do.

Her query though, did raise an interesting point, which is the degree to which the emphasis of Facebook marketing has shifted from engaging content, conversation, and relationship building, to ever more sophisticated ways of making the most of your Facebook advertising budget.

The restrictions on accessing your Facebook audience caused by the more recent versions of the algorithm, make an emphasis on ongoing conversations almost redundant. Unless you are paying to boost every single post to your Likers, most people are not going to see most of what you post.

And rightly or wrongly, for most businesses, the content they are prepared to pay to extend the reach of tends to be the kind that has a closer relationship to the bottom line – announcements about a seasonal sale or a new product, rather than a funny meme related to their sector.

With hindsight, this has significantly affected the way that businesses use Facebook in the last year or two.

We’d even go as far as to say that with a good understanding of the Facebook advertising suite, businesses can and do use it primarily as an advertising platform. A uniquely powerful one, for sure, with unique ways of targeting and magnifying their message. But still, compared to the “be social. it’s like being in the pub with your clients” message that underpinned most Facebook marketing strategies five years ago, how far have we come?

UK Social Media Statistics for 2017

The tree is down and the tinsel is wilting, so it must be time for our annual review of social media use in the UK at the start of 2017.  We do this for two reasons: one, because statistics that focus purely on UK based users can be hard to come by, and two, because it also helps us clarify our own “hunches” about how things are going for each of the major sites, and use that information when we’re working with our business and third sector clients in the UK.

There’s also some good news: UK specific statistics have become a little easier to find this year. Props must go to agency We Are Flint for carrying out their own primary research during 2016, complete with actual transparency about how the research was carried out (link below to the entire report) and Statista.com is also offering a decent amount of open source information. We’re grateful to both organisations for those contributions, as well as the other source sites linked within this post.

UK social media in 2017: general thoughts

We talked in our last annual update about the fact that the mainstream social media market is now mature. Nothing has changed there; there haven’t been any significant upsets this year, and it’s been a while since a genuinely “new” entrant offered anything different. The “Big 3″ in the UK (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) have more or less stayed static in user terms for several years. Apart from a potentially interesting Twitter vs Instagram clash, the only action is around the smaller players and ancilliary apps like Snapchat which we see more as utilities than social networks.

We’re going to kick off this year with two charts that we think contain the most crucial information for social media strategy planning if you’re a UK business: Total UK Users by Site (based on the current “best estimate” as described below, where the site has not provided figures), and the percentage of those users who log in daily.

Remember, a registered user who never goes onto the site isn’t going to be a viable target for your marketing!

UK Facebook Users 2017

So let’s kick off our indepth review with the Big Daddy, Facebook. Once again the overall number hasn’t budged all that much; we’re looking at around 32 million user accounts in the UK. That’s been pretty steady for around three years now. We Are Flint’s report puts the proportion of over 18s in the UK who use Facebook at 78% – so still, after all these years, probably the single most consolidated channel available to marketers for accessing most of the population in one place (after snail mail, which surely only those printing their own money can afford these days!).

We also have, courtesy of Statista.com. a nice breakdown of the demographics within that figure, which does offer some interesting observations. No, Facebook probably isn’t “cool” any more. My ageing Samsung Galaxy, if it was ever cool, certainly isn’t now either, but that doesn’t stop me using it constantly.

Looking at these stats, the same is true of Facebook: the largest demographic is the 20-29 year olds, clearly showing that it’s not just everyone’s Mum using Facebook these days.

With organic post reach now sitting at around a measly 10%, the major area of interest for businesses using Facebook now is the development of new types of advertising, and the fluctuation in cost. This year we’ve seen enhancements or new introductions in ever more sophisticated ad targeting – Lookalike Audiences, Dynamic Ads and a whole suite of options around remarketing to website visitors. For large ecommerce sites this is a godsend. For smaller businesses, anecdotally it seems as though the cost of reaching the standard 1,000 eyeballs, or achieving a good volume of link clicks, is on the increase. This may be partly due to the more targeted types of advertising being more costly, which is not unreasonable if the results match up to their promise.

There are numerous studies showing that social media advertising is by far the cheapest medium.  Ad Espresso tell us that overall CPM on Facebook actually declined during 2016, but there are so many factors influencing what any individual business will spend that it’s almost inevitable that your mileage will vary. As an aside, if you’re interested in what factors affect your ad spend, and how they affect it, Ad Espresso have a superb report here covering every aspect, from ad placement to the demographic being targeted, and the day and even hour that the advert runs in.

UK LinkedIn users 2017

Like all the mature sites, LinkedIn’s growth is also slowing, but there is still some growth. Last year we had a figure of around 19 million UK users; this year the figure is 21 million. You can see LinkedIn’s own global figures here.

When planning your strategy, though, it’s important to remember that the average user uses LinkedIn very different to the way Facebook’s average user uses Facebook. And that’s why you won’t see too much emphasis on metrics such as “monthly active users” or time spent on the site in an average month. Unless they are actively job hunting, or actively using LinkedIn as part of their job role (think Enterprise software sales execs), we believe that most people who are registered with LinkedIn, don’t necessarily touch that account for weeks at a time.

Again we’re going on anecdotal evidence with a pinch of common sense – by its very nature, LinkedIn’s content offering doesn’t begin to compare with how compelling Facebook’s is, where users are on the site multiple times each day exchanging banter with their social networks or just surfing for something to cheer themselves up.

UK Instagram Users 2017

Instagram themselves haven’t released any new data since that which we used in last year’s report, giving us 14 million Monthly Active Users in the UK, from a global MAU figure of 300 million. The global figure was updated in December 2016 to an impressive 600 million, but it would basically be a total guess as to whether the UK’s growth has kept pace with the global growth.

It’s hard to tell at this point whether Instagram is continuing to cannibalise Twitter’s market, particularly among the younger demographic – that seemed to be the case in previous years, but the research that we’re referencing here doesn’t really support it.  Which is good from a marketing point of view, because the lack of native “retweet” function and inability to include links in a post, means that driving anything other than general brand awareness is harder work on Instagram!

The We Are Flint survey suggested that 29% of UK adults use Instagram, which would give us a figure around the 19 million mark.  The same report also gives a proportion of 64% of users as being under 30 – but gives the same figure for Twitter, which has generally been considered to be an older demographic thus far. Even more interestingly, Instagram has something of a peak in the higher income brackets (though not as much as Twitter does); 46% of users reported a household income of over £48k per annum.

From a general strategy point of view, Instagram has joined Facebook and Twitter this year in filtering which of your followed accounts’ posts you actually see. That seems a clear pointer that in the not too distant future, you can expect to be paying Instagram for any kind of guaranteed reach at all, in the same way we now have to pay for reach on Facebook.

UK Pinterest Users 2017

We’ve not had anything directly from Pinterest this year on the subject of UK user numbers, so the stats below come from third party research.

All the indications though are that Pinterest’s early period of stellar growth has definitely stalled.  Although Pinterest did tell us that their global MAU figure was up to 150 million in October of 2016, just 5% of the UK population log in to Pinterest on a daily basis.

Interestingly, at some point the Pinterest user demographic has got a LOT younger. In the US, and in the early days of UK use, older (as well as more affluent) users were in the majority. In 2017 however, research from both Statista and We Are Flint suggests that 50%+ of Pinterest users are in the 18-29 age bracket.

The female gender bias has persisted however, with 38% of women who are online reporting that they use Pinterest, whereas only 20% of men say the same thing.

In terms of how people are actually using the site (which should give you some clues as to whether your business will be commercially successful there), here’s a useful summary from Pinterest’s CEO, Ben Silbermann :

Pinterest is more of a personal tool than a social one. People don’t come to see what their friends are doing. (There are lots of other great places out there for that!) Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.

UK Twitter Users 2017

Twitter did provide a very minimal status update around the middle of last year, which gave a global MAU figure of 313 million, and 79% of those accounts being outside the US. That would be sufficient to keep them ahead of Instagram in the global rankings, just.

Other independent research gives us figures of 45% of UK Online Adults using Twitter, with 37% of those account holders logging in daily.  Using the ONS figure of 45.9 million for the UK’s online population, that would give us a user base of around 20 million.  That seems plausible, if maybe a little generous, compared to the last “official” UK figure of 13 million which was provided in 2013.

The same research reports a surprisingly young demographic, too: 64% of users are 18-29, 57% 30-49, and 33% 50-61.  The more affluent citizens are also over-represented on Twitter, with 62% in the 48K+ household income bracket – bearing in mind that the median UK household income this year was just over £26k.

If you’re interested in how people are actually using Twitter, there’s a really good, and up to date, report here from the BBC.  From that we learn that a relatively small number of highly active users dominate in terms of posting content – 1% of accounts are responsible for 20% of all tweets, and 85% of all tweets are accounted for by just 15% of total accounts.

The number of actual tweets sent each day has remained almost constant since 2013, despite increases in monthly active users. So, if you’re planning a campaign on Twitter, be aware that there are a *lot* of users out there who read but never post!

So there we have it: the social media landscape for the UK in 2017. As ever, we hope it’ll help you plan your strategy – and if you need some help figuring out what you should be using and how, get in touch!

Credits

https://weareflint.co.uk/uk-social-media-demographics-2016

www.statista.com

www.social-media-co.uk

As well as being relevant for your personal use, this is something that organisations would benefit from explaining to their Facebook followers, too. Your Likers are there because they want to hear from you, so provided you are posting valuable content, and not swamping Likers’ feeds with constant and / or uninteresting posts, it’s reasonable to assume that they’d prefer not to have Facebook filter you out of their feed. So, sending them to this article will help them actually see what you’ve posted.

(If you didn’t realise that Facebook is deciding which posts you get to see? there’s a little more background from a business point of view here).

So, here’s a really quick tip that you can pass on to your Likers, which will ensure that not only do they definitely see your posts, but they’ll see them at the top of their feed.

Getting your whole News Feed – 3 easy steps

Step 1: go to the Facebook Page of the organisation whose content you want to prioritise. We’re using The Daily Mash here.

Step 2: Look for the drop-down icon next to the “Liked” button (you’ve already Liked the page, right?!) as shown by the whopping great arrow below:

Step 3: Click on the icon, and choose “See First” in the menu below:

And that’s it! You should now see posts from that organisation right at the top of your feed whenever you log in to Facebook.

If you change your mind, just repeat the above but this time choose “Default” from the same dropdown.

Initially, my eye was caught by a story about the Conservative Party spending over a hundred thousand pounds per month on various advertising and promotional activities on Facebook.

Invoices obtained by the BBC apparently show spends of £122,814 in September 2014, and £114,956 in November:

(Click the image for the full story on the BBC website).

So clearly, that’s a lot of money, but that’s not the really interesting thing about the article. Further down, a digital expert who’s quoted as currently working with the Labour Party on their online marketing, says

“I understand that the Labour party has been spending less than £10,000 a month on its own Facebook presence”.

Now, the spin provided in the article is simply that Labour spend less because they don’t have the resources that the Tories do, due to being linked with fewer (they imply) evil millionaire megalomaniacs stroking white cats in their mountain lairs. Or something.

But then I remembered something that had been very viral in my personal Facebook feed lately, and wondered if possibly the story was slightly different.

I wondered if, perhaps,  the Labour party don’t NEED to spend anything like that amount, because they’ve come up with a clever way to use Facebook which ensures that their content spreads organically, AND they are able to collect voters’ email addresses (one of the elements that there was a line item for in the Conservatives’ invoice) without any additional cost.

Maybe some of you have seen this in your Facebook feed? It’s been anonymised to protect the privacy of the originator:

Clicking on that newsfeed item takes the user to a website which looks like this:

Are you seeing how this is working, yet?

Person A publishes their “how many people have my name” result, and it appears in Person B’s feed, because they are Facebook friends.

Person B fancies getting their result, so clicks on the newsfeed item. On arrival at the website, they’re invited to hand over some minimal but important personal information*, and once they have “their” number, they are able to post that back into their own Facebook feed.

Whereupon, presumably, persons C and D notice it and decide to click and…you get the idea. Viral in its purest form.

And because it’s organic (ie, friends are sharing it with each other, voluntarily, through their news feeds) it won’t be costing a penny. There will almost certainly have been some initial spend in order to get the ball rolling – presumably where that 10k per month comes in – but unlike the Conservatives, Labour aren’t reliant on putting the pounds constantly into the top of the Facebook slot machine in order to get those all important email addresses out of the bottom.

The perfect viral storm on Facebook

All credit to the Labour party here, they have thought through every aspect of this process, and exploited the Facebook environment perfectly.

The basic concept (finding out how many people with your name are registered to vote) is simple but clearly catchy enough for many people to bother engaging with.

The website is carefully designed so that you fill in your details as quickly as possible in order to get your result.

And the graphics and text which go back into the user’s newsfeed with their result, speaks directly to the next batch of contacts (“How common is your name?“, not “I found out how common my name is” or something similar).

Impressive, right?

*re that personal information: here’s the small (really quite small) print from the bottom of that webpage. Assuming you read beyond the big red “get your number” button because, yeah, we all do, right?!

Simple, powerful, unique

If this one example isn’t enough to convince anyone out there of the kind of power that clever use of Facebook can unleash, nothing will.  Let’s look at the resources used:  A simple, one page website capable of collecting some basic information. A feed from publicly available electoral roll data. Some creativity to tap into people’s curiousity about themselves and their names. And access to the single biggest concentration of UK citizens, and their social ties, that has ever existed.

And around the outside of the site hoardings, a bright banner advertising off plan sales of the new apartments, and inviting me to “follow {the developer} on Facebook to win an IPad!”.

That developer isn’t alone, by any means; most weeks I notice more than one advert offering a similar “bribe”, in magazines, window posters, or even on Facebook or Twitter.

Those companies are not just using their Facebook Competition in a really lazy, poorly thought out way, but they’re actively making trouble and expense for themselves further down the line. Here’s why.

What’s the point of a Facebook Giveaway?

Back to basics, why does anyone give stuff away on Facebook? Unless they’ve woken up one morning blocked into their house by a mountain of unwanted IPads, it’s because they want to attract people to Like their Facebook page.

But that’s where it starts to go wrong. In fact, MOST companies don’t really want “people” to Like their Facebook page; they want potential customers to Like their Facebook page.

How big the gap is between “people” and “potential customers” does depend to an extent on what your product or service is. If you’re selling multi million pound yachts (or expensive flats in London), it’s pretty big. If you’re selling crisps, it’s smaller – although some people may not particularly like crisps, yours might be so great that they do like them, and at least it’s fair to say that most people have a use for them (eating) and can afford them.

Most companies though, aren’t making FMCG products.

So what those companies are actually doing, every time they have some kind of generic giveaway, is building a big audience of people who like IPads. Great if you’re Apple, less so if you’re building apartments.

And as building that audience is just step one of the process, they then have a hard time keeping that audience engaged; after a few posts about yachts or flats, the “Un-Like” statistics will start going in entirely the wrong direction.

And then the bills start

But as I said at the beginning, there’s even worse news if you’ve built an audience that way. A year or two back, you’d have just wasted the money you spent on that IPad, and probably seen your hard earned audience dwindle over time. Since the Facebook News Feed algorithm changes though, it’s actually going to cost you money to get your posts in front of all those people who are never going to buy your product.

We know that “organic” (free, to you and I) reach has been decimated since the end of last year, so paying Facebook, at least some of the time, to get your Posts out there, is a necessary evil. That’s one thing if you know that your audience is a relevant and receptive one. As soon as you run a “generic” giveaway, you’re building up a mix of “people” and “potential customers” – and there’s no way to separate those once you have to start paying to reach them.

How to improve your Facebook giveways by 100%

To avoid this, businesses need to be a LOT more strategic in their choice of giveaway. In fact, the best possible giveaway item is one that will appeal to the FEWEST people –  but those people who absolutely love your product or service.

This isn’t as hard as it sounds. Going back to my developer, they could have offered the same value as the IPad, but in free conveyancing on your flat purchase. Completely useless to anyone not considering buying one of those flats, but very valuable to anyone who is.

Giving away your own product, or something very closely related to it (like the conveyancing) is usually the best place to start with a giveaway – not only does it guarantee that the Likers are keen on what you do, it’s also likely to have a lower direct cost to you than buying someone else’s product! It’s also a good idea to think about the things you can provide that money can’t usually buy. For example, rather than just giving away tickets to your event or show, provide some VIP privileges along with them.

So, start thinking smarter about what you can offer that will attract your die hard fans. It’ll make the world of difference.

Apparently, a few Smart Cookies are making megabucks from these sites; this is how it works. They dredge the internet, and other “viral” type sites like Reddit, for content which ticks the shareability buttons, come up with alluring headlines*, and republish that content onto their own websites with the clickbait titles added. Then, they feed those links into Facebook, often with an initial advertising budget to start pushing them into people’s news feeds as Boosted Posts, and wait for the traffic to start flooding in.

Because of the way Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm works (or has until this week), a clickbait rolling stone headline will gather a very large amount of moss indeed. Or to put it another way, every time one of your friends clicks on one of those articles, it becomes more likely to show up in your feed. If you click too, you’re passing on the joy to your friends. So with that initial investment in a boosted post, the article gets traction throughout Facebook and starts sending lots of traffic back to the original Smart Cookie’s website….which they can then monetise by selling ad space on the basis of all those zillions of page views.

So basically, the Smart Cookies have been exploiting Facebook to deliver traffic to their own sites, for their own reasons.

Strangely enough, Facebook aren’t very keen on this, and have now announced that they intend to knock the whole thing on the head.  For one thing, someone else is cashing in on their customer base; for another, all those lovely clicks are departing Facebook and landing on the Smart Cookies’ websites; and for a third thing, some users possibly find those headlines annoying. We’ll leave it to you guess which of those three things are the official reason for the algorithm change they’ve just announced which will reduce the visibility of these articles…

Here’s the full official release if you’d like to read a slightly less snarky view of the whole story: News Feed FYI: click baiting

* alluring in the way that a carrier bag of cheap chocolate is alluring. It’s hard to ignore but will leave you feeling kinda nauseous and grubby if you go there

Facebook Page vs Facebook Group – Definitions

So, let’s start with what Facebook has to say.

Facebook Pages:

“…allow entities such as public figures and organizations to broadcast information to their fans.”

Whereas Facebook Groups are for

“..members… to connect, share and even collaborate on a given topic or idea”.

So, here’s the first point about the difference between the two, and it’s an important one: Pages are intended primarily for one-to-many broadcast. You run the show, your Likers join in. That’s not so say that discussions can’t take place between community members, they can, but it’ll be within the context of a post that you initiated.

One of the things that many people are unaware of with Pages, is that if a user posts on your Page, only you and anyone directly visiting that Page will actually see it. It will NOT appear in other Likers’ News Feeds, UNLESS you choose to share the post. Depending on the type of organisation you are, and what you’re trying to achieve with Facebook, that may be an advantage or a disadvantage – more on this below.

The key word in the Group description is collaborate. Groups are much more about a many-to-many discussion; think of them as all the members sitting in a big circle in a room, rather than classroom style with you at the front!

What that means in practice, is that when any group member posts to the group, that post will go into all the other members’ news feeds (News Feed Algorithm notwithstanding) without any kind of involvement, or moderation, from you. You will still have the ability to delete inappropriate posts and so on, but the basic assumption is that all members are of equal importance in terms of creating content.

Pages vs Groups – pros and cons

So hopefully you can already see that there is a distinct difference between Pages and Groups. They’re definitely not just interchangeable. But beyond the basic structure, there are some additional pros and cons which you need to be aware of when choosing your Facebook presence.

Facebook Page Pros

With a Facebook Page, you get access to a whole host of enhanced features which aren’t available to Group owners. These include:

Promotion. The opportunity to promote your content to a wider audience, via Promoted Posts, Advertising and so on, is only available to Facebook Pages, not to Groups. If attracting new members, or promoting specific content or offers in a short time frame is important to you, then this is going to be a deal breaker and you will need to use a Page.

Analytics. The facebook Insights package, which is included free of charge with all Pages, is very powerful and is continuing to be actively developed by Facebook – so it’s likely to get even better in the future. Insights can show you all kinds of valuable stuff from who your Likers are (where they come from, what age group and gender they are, and even when most of them are logged on to Facebook) to which of your Posts are most effective. You can even compare the performance of your Page with that of a competitor, without the competitor knowing about it. So again, this is a huge plus for Pages over Groups.

Visibility. When you’re in Admin mode for your Page, posting on other Pages creates a nice live link back to your own organisation.

News Feed. Liking another Page while you’re in Admin mode will pull that Page’s content into your Page’s News Feed (not your personal feed). This allows you to automatically collate content from partners or businesses which are complementary to yours, for example wedding photographers or florists if you’re promoting a wedding venue. That not only helps you keep in touch with those businesses, but it will often provide a good source of content which will be valuable to your own Likers, too.

Facebook Page Cons

Community spirit and engagement. Tthere are exceptions, but the majority of Pages find creating a real spirit of community – where Likers actively request and value other Likers’ opinions – an ongoing challenge.

You will be fighting the News Feed algorithm. Although we’ve not studied this scientifically, our own experience and those of our clients suggests that Facebook is far less generous when deciding how many Page posts are going to reach Likers’ newsfeeds, than they are with Group posts.

Moving on to Groups, there are pros and cons here, too. (Sorry – we never said it would be an easy decision!).

Facebook Group Pros

The major advantage is the way that Group posts work, in terms of the visibility of all posts to all members, and the higher probability (we believe) of a Group post showing up in a members’ News Feed vs an un-Boosted Page post.

Privacy options. The other Group-only function is the ability to make the group Closed. This means that a group administrator has to approve every new member before they get access, and group discussions are not visible to non members. Of course, if you’re aiming to build visibility on Facebook, this is a bad thing. But if you’re dealing with a sensitive topic / product / service which your users may not want to be seen discussing in “public”, this is the only way to go.

It’s also worth considering making a Group Closed in other circumstances, though. With an Open Group, each time a member comments on a post, that comment is likely to be included in their friends’ news feeds. If the Group discussions are on a fairly niche area, and it is (or is likely to become) a very busy group, members may actually prefer it if that wasn’t the case. That’s not necessarily because it’s a sensitive topic, but just because their friends may not share their avid interest in tropical fish breeding! So by Closing the group, you’re removing the issue of members self-limiting the amount they engage because their friends are telling them they’re sick of hearing about Guppies.

Group disadvantages

Apart from missing out on the promotional and analytical functions you get with a Page, the other issue we see with Groups is futureproofing. Group functionality hasn’t been actively developed by Facebook for a while, and unlike Business Pages they aren’t a direct revenue generating area. So in theory, there may be a higher risk that Facebook bins the Group function in the future.

However, good Groups definitely make a big contribution to Facebook’s “stickiness” – the frequency with which users log in, and the amount of time they spend on the site. So we don’t think Facebook are likely to kill off Groups altogether, but they may miss out on function enhancements in the future.

So, when do I use a Facebook Group?!

Hopefully you can analyse the pros and cons of each option above in terms of the impact on your own organisation type and objectives, as there really isn’t one right or wrong answer here. In general, if your Facebook strategy is quite strongly commercial – for example, you want to use it to sell directly, make special offers, reach out to a targeted audience quickly – then a Page will likely be the right choice.

On the other hand, if your product or service would benefit from a much “softer” approach, and/or you’re in a very niche area, then a Group might work better for you. For example, let’s say you’re selling Dog Agility equipment, and the community of people who own dogs and do agility with them is quite small – but extremely committed and interested in sharing knowledge. In those circumstances giving up some control in favour of hosting a very active community (to which you then have access for sales purposes!) might well be worth it.

Have we missed anything? We’re still realising little differences in the way both options work which can make a big difference, so if you’re aware of anything else please do comment below.