Facts about the fight against Fake Likes
The major reason why Facebook cares about fake likes is simple: “likes created by fake accounts or people without real intent are bad for people on Facebook, advertisers and Facebook itself”. People and businesses who use Facebook want real connections and results. Reasons enough to fight against the fake likes.
In short: What are fake likes?
Fake likes are external services that sell packages of likes from fake accounts or people without real intent by offering a certain number of likes for a flat fee. To recognize as ads ”buy 10,000 likes!”
4 Primary ways in which fake likes are generated
- Click farms, individuals with real accounts on Facebook are paid to manually like specific Pages
- Fake accounts, do not represent real people and are generated for liking Pages
- Self-compromised accounts, a person knowingly installs malware or gives up control of their account
- Compromised accounts, have been infected with malware without the knowledge of the account owners
The major improvements in the fight against fake likes in the last 6 months
New advances in Facebook’s pattern recognition technologies helped Facebook halt many of the major exchanges that promote fake like activity on Facebook. When Facebook see suspicious patterns of likes coming from or to a specific account, they throughly investigate the situation in order to determine whether there is fraudulent activity taking place.
This has made it extremely difficult for the people selling fraudulent likes to actually deliver their promised likes to paying customers.
Alerting impacted admins with notifications to Page administrators
Facebook send notifications to Page administrators when they block or remove fake likes from their Pages to help them learn how to gather authentic fans.
“Since introducing this feature in March 2015, we’ve notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes”
3 Tips for authentic interactions and protecting yourself from fake likes
Protect yourself from getting caught up in fraudulent activity with the following tips:
Don’t buy fraudulent likes that hurt your business in the long term
Fraudulent likes are going to do more harm than good for your page. Pages with an artificially inflated number of likes are actually making it harder on themselves to reach the people they care about most.
Focus on real business objectives, not just likes
Your business will see much greater value if you use Facebook to achieve specific business objectives, like conversions or generate clicks to your blog. With the focus on key business objectives you can use the possibility to build audiences of real people. Targeting is the key to obtaining the specific results you want from your campaign.
Be cautious to avoid infecting your computer with malware
Malware, the software to take unwanted actions on your behalf, such as liking pages. You can get malware of from thing like:
- Visiting a website that claims to offer “special” features on Facebook
- Downloading a browser add-on that claims to do something for your Facebook experience like “who’s viewing your profile”
- Clicking a suspicious link with “sensitive” information like: “unbelievable photos of you”
More information about Facebook Security
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