Are you looking to build up your Facebook friends or overall fan base on one of your pages? If you are, you will be pleased to hear that you don’t have to work hard on building better relationships with people anymore because you can now buy friends instead. Yes you heard me correctly, according to Advertising Age you can buy them in groups of thousands – how wrong is that? So you can now go out and buy yourself, or your client, some friends to become fans of your pages.
Advertising Age reports:
“The folks at online ad firm uSocial are taking that a step further: Pay them money and they’ll make you at least appear to be very big on Facebook. In fact, they’ll deliver you 5,000 Facebook “friends” for 7.6 cents per friend ($654.30), or up to 10,000 Facebook “fans” for a mere 8.5 cents a fan ($1.167.30).”
I find this to be completely wrong. As a public relations professional working in the digital sector, I would strongly recommend any of my clients against ever doing something like this. If you need to buy your followers, friends or fans then your content, or social media strategy as a whole, is simply not good enough and you need to review them both quickly.
In my experience to make a social media campaign work effectively can be challenging, but buying followers and friends is plain wrong and won’t work if you want your campaign and future campaigns to have any element of sustainability. Social media is about relationships and people need to remember that.
Apparently Facebook is taking a long hard look at uSocial and so it should. In my view this should be stopped ASAP.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
