Why My Fanpage Is Losing Likes?

Some time ago I wrote this post about a method I employed to gain almost 500 likes to my Facebook fanpage in 2 days. I advertised my page and targeted it to developing countries located in southern Asia. This is what I did at that time.

During last month I noticed that my like number not only stopped to grow, but even started to decrease. In about a month I lost like 10% of my fans.

Today I saw a Veritasium video on YouTube that gave me some clues about what is really happening.

It’s really mind blowing, just see for yourself:

Long story short, this is what it’s all about:

There are a few methods of getting likes on your fanpage:

1. Through Facebook ads (purchased through Facebook, the legitimate way).
2. By buying likes (purchased outside Facebook, which is considered illegitimate way).
3. Organically or by asking people to like your page  (for free)

Now, lately Facebook made some statements about why fanpages started to get thinner and thinner. They claimed that they are closing the fake accounts, thus the likes generated by these account are disappearing as well. That’s what they say.

But the issue is even deeper. There are rumors that FB pages will continue to lose likes unless you keep running ads. 🙁

Why you should avoid buying likes?

Purchasing likes outside Facebook is the illegitimate way, I agree with that. You can go to websites like boostlikes.com and buy 1000 likes for $70, but in such case your likes are generated by so called click farms located in developing countries, mostly from southern Asia. They are hiring people just to click everywhere and on everything.

The result? You get a ton of likes from people that hardly get engaged with your content.

What about legitimate advertising?

What Facebook is offering to legitimately pay for likes? Advertising your fanpage through them, and I understand that too.

Okay, so by using what Facebook offers as legitimate, do you think the problems are gone? No way. In the video above you’ll see an experiment proving that legitimately purchased likes can be also fake.

What?!

Yes, you read that right. Even if you launch a perfectly legitimate ad, you may end up with a big portion of likes coming from click farms and get less engagement.

I also used this method, and now I’m paying the price. 😉

The organic followers, on the other hand, also have quite a small engagement, because they are not targeted.

And the engagement of your followers is a crucial factor to have your posts distributed to more people. Why? Because, by default, Facebook distributes your posts to a small fraction of your followers. The more likes, comments and sharing you receive, the bigger fraction will receive your future posts. The opposite is also true.

The solution. No, really?

So how to avoid those little engaging followers? Your only option is through promotions targeted mainly to countries, like USA, Canada, Australia and UK, in a word “tier 1 countries“. But even then, you may run into individuals that like a lot of things. Anything you can think of. An this only to mask their activity within their click farm.

Just watch the video above to see the conclusion of the story. It’s most controversial, at least so it seems to me.