Think Before You Pay Facebook to Promote Your Page

Facebook paid promotions help you get your page in front of more users and build your likes. This may sound like a good thing, but Derek Muller, video personality of Veritasium, published a video today that explains how promotions hurt small businesses more than help.

The problem is your advertising dollars may put your page in front of the wrong eyeballs. So-called “Like farming” services exist in developing countries. These paid services create fake accounts to artificially build up “Likes” for customers, but to avoid detection by Facebook’s automated services, these farmers also “like” legitimate pages, possibly yours. The more you promote your page, the more you put yourself at risk of getting these fake likes.

When your page has a very large amount of users that aren’t interacting with your content, Facebook limits the exposure of that content.

By paying Facebook to promote your page, it puts it in front of many users and a lot them can be fake. These fake users will “Like” your page but have no subsequent interactions with your content. If you have a large portion of your audience not interacting with your content, Facebook doesn’t show that content to many of your followers and the likelihood of that content being seen by true fans goes down.

Have you used the page promotion option on Facebook? What were your results?

Watch the video to see the full explanation.