Buying Facebook friends or Twitter followers – is wrong

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.

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  Lloyd Gofton

  September 4th

  I couldn’t agree with you more Chris.
  In fact i’ve quoted you in my own post on the subject: http://www.liberatemedia.com/blog/buying-friends-isnt-social-its-antisocial/
  As anyone, with even the smallest understanding of social media, will confirm, at the heart of social media is a number of basic elements such as listening, conversation, openness, community, reputation, trust…I could go on. So how does buying followers, friends or votes help?
  This is another example of old media rules being applied to a social media world. E.g. If I stick an advert in a newspaper with a readership of one million, I’ll get a massive return, easy! Advert placed, sit down and wait for phone to ring…you’ll be waiting a long time.

• 

  Ben Cotton

  September 15th

  Buying friends on Facebook is outrageous and as you rightly say, if you have to resort to such lows ‘then your content, or social media strategy as a whole, is simply not good enough and you need to review them both quickly’.
  Facebook need to clamp on this sort of behaviour by uSocial, which is just spam – plain and simple. Hotmail has been completely ruined by spammers and Facebook will be well advised to intervene now, before it is too late.

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  Chris Norton

  September 15th

  Ben – I completely agree. It’s stories like this that give social networking a bad name. Content is king and numbers mean nothing. If you buy 30,000 friends on Facebook what does that actually achieve – Nothing at all.