EdgeRank and IPM+
And that is important: the EdgeRank. Because apart from the fact that the public can notice that you have obtained your likes in a not entirely legal way, there is another disadvantage to buying reach. Namely: the relevance of your page. Facebook is in a similar situation as Google: there is a lot of data (pages) to choose from. Google solves this by using the PageRank : the more relevant a page is for a certain search term, the higher it appears in the results page. Facebook uses a similar method, the EdgeRank .
EdgeRank determines how relevant a personal profile is to friends, but also how relevant a Facebook list to data Page is to the public. This is done based on affinity (your own behavior towards the page), time (how long ago a message was posted) and weight of the status update or Facebook page. Based on this, Facebook determines how long status updates of Facebook pages remain in the news overview of users. As more and more pages are created and Facebook users like more and more brands and companies on Facebook, this metric becomes increasingly important.
If you bought 10,000 likes, from people who are not at all involved with your brand or organization, the conclusion is simple: there will not be much interaction on your page or likes on your status updates. And since EdgeRank is a relative metric, not an absolute one, your page will get a lower and lower rating.
facebook-like-buttonIn addition to the EdgeRank of Facebook itself, a Dutch list of Facebook pages is also maintained . In contrast to the list of March 2012 (see example Seats and Sofas), an important element has now been added: IPM+. The outcome of the associated formula indicates how interactive a page is, relative to the number of likes. Here too, quality over quantity applies.
Twitter and Pinterest
Buy Twitter followers? Buy Pinterest followers? For every (new) social network there is a market to buy reach. Looking at Twitter you could say that it is more justified to buy followers, after all there is no algorithm that determines which updates end up in the feed of the followers, everything ends up there.
There is another important reason not to buy reach; the fact that social networks do 'clean-up rounds' every now and then. Fake profiles are removed and with them the connections they have. It suddenly doesn't seem so cool to drop from 10,000 likes to 200. Those 200 remaining 'real' followers will certainly notice.