Facebook fans can be bought

On page 98 of The Conversity Model I mention a current form of black hat social media services:

I have met social media consultants who claim to be able to ‘sell’ you Facebook fans for as little as 50 eurocents per fan. This must mean that after ‘click farms’ (to click on your advertising), ‘content farms’ (to write your blog posts), there are now also ‘fan farms’ (to give you the illusion that your fan page is popular).

According to digital marketer Shiv Singh, the going rate for fan acquisition is roughly $0.60 to $1.00 per fan:

If I wanted to create the largest brand page on Facebook, I could do that quickly by just spending. I could use a large percentage of a digital media budget to buy those fans. It'll take probably two weeks but I would have the largest Facebook brand page in no time. Does it mean that I have the most popular brand online or that I'm the most social media savvy marketer out there? Of course not. It just means that I have a very large budget.

In the end, these non-organic "fans" will barely interact with the messages on your Page. And that's a shame, since Facebook's advertising solutions, if used well, can quickly scale up your fan count too.

Source:

• Will you tie bonuses to Facebook fan counts? @ goingsocialnow.com