How to get Facebook Likes (The right way)

Don't use shady facebook promotion services!

Before I get into how to get likes correctly, I would like to explain why you should never use facebook "like" services. I can see how it would be tempting for a small business or maybe a band or entertainer to use one of these services. "Gee, all I have to do is pay these guys $150 and now I'll have 1000 likes". You might as well throw your money away. The problem with doing this is that most of these services use software to generate fake profiles in facebook and then, set that same software to like your page. Or some of these companies just manually make fake profiles and get them to like your page. Both of these methods are against facebooks terms of use and could get your account banned.

If you haven't figured out why this is bad, then pay close attention to the phrase "fake profiles". You see, the whole point of gaining facebook likes is to promote your product or service to the people who like your page. Here is a scenario for you: You are in a band and you order up 1000 fans from one of these services. The service creates 1000 fake profiles and has them like your page. "Wow" you say to yourself, now you have 1000 facebook fans to promote your show to and maybe download your new demo. Now ask yourself "How many of these fake profiles are going to attend my show?" The answer is 0, they are fake. Fake profiles are also not going to download your music. And worst of all, fake profiles can't share your posts, like or comment on your posts or interact with your page in anyway.

"But the company offering this service promises that they are all real people." Well just tell the people that are offering to get you all the facebook likes that you will pay them when you verify all the people are real. You can easily verify real people by just going to the profiles and reading their wall. If you go to a profile and it's a ghost town with a bunch of random interest and likes, you got yourself a fake. When your done reading this article you should learn How to identify fake facebook profiles.

So how should I get facebook likes?

Well this answer may scare you at first, but you should buy facebook ads. Don't panic, it can be very affordable, you can spend as little or as much as you like. Lets take that $150 you were going to spend with the shady service as the example. I'll show you how this works.

Facebook makes it incredibly easy to buy ads once you have created you facebook page. Just login to your facebook account, go to your page and look on the right column. You will see several options to "promote your page".

Once you are ready to buy ads on facebook, there are a range of targeting options. That's right, you can pick and choose who sees you ad. For example if you are a video games store, you could only show your ads to males, aged 16-30 and living within 25 miles of your location. Then you can spend as little as $1 a day. Facebook only chargers you for every time someone clicks on your add. And with the targeting options you can rest assure that the people clicking your ad are facebook users that are interested in your product or service. Take a look at the image below, which is a screen shot of the pricing and scheduling options.

Just as important as the targeting options is the social aspects that come into play when advertising on facebook. When people like your page they can spread the word to their fiends by interacting with your page. Hopefully this will create a snowball effect of gaining likes to your page. Now you have "real" fans to promote you company to. Then once you get going and grow your fan base you can set your ads to display who likes your page. Take a look at the mock ad I made as you can see, it says "Brandon Nickles likes this". This encourages others to like your page as well.

Gaining facebook fans or likes is a key element in creating a successful social media presence for your business. Facebook advertising, when used correctly is a great tool for creating that success. Sure, you may only get a couple hundred "likes" compared to the 1000 you would get from the shady service, but I would rather promote my services to 200 real people than 1000 fake people any day. If you want to find out more about facebook advertising, you should check out: http://www.facebook.com/adsmarketing/ and see how facebook ads can help your local business.