A client recently bought likes for her page against my advice. As a result she got a lot of new likes which initially was very exciting for her, but then her Edge Rank dropped and suddenly her posts were not showing up in the newsfeeds of her real fans and her engagement on the page dropped to near zero. 

If you don’t know what an Edge Rank is, you’re not alone. Most people don’t even know it exists. 

Facebook has a ranking system called “EdgeRank”. To put it simply Facebook looks at how many friends you have for your Facebook page, how many times your friends have interacted with your posts (share, liked, commented), The algorithm runs and checks to see if there is an affinity between you and each fan.

Facebook is looking to see if you have common interests and the quality of those interests, and it does this with an algorithm. For example has this fan responded on your page before? Have you commented on something they posted? Have you exchanged posts only once or twice in two years? Are the topics you talk about on your page showing up in the fan’s daily activities? Are friends of the fan interacting with it?

Flatly stated, if nobody shares, comments or likes your posts, Facebook isn’t going to put it in their news feeds because you’re not interesting to them. Or at least they haven’t demonstrated any interest.

So instead of buying fans invest in developing real content that attracts new fans and run some ads to help them find you.

@carolinechen-whatley  Edgerank is based in part by the number of fans and the % who engage, so if you add a bunch of un-engaged fans that engagement ratio is immediately thrown off.

She had engaged fans and although I don’t know what her edgerank was at the time she was showing up in feeds and had some good discussions on her page.But adding the large ## of fans reduced the percentage of responses and her page disappeared from feeds.

It’s always better to have a few engaged fans who love you than a mob of people who couldn’t care less.

Yes, that’s true as ar as the affinity portion of the algorithm but they don’t just consider one part, they pull it all together and if you “water down” your fan base with unrelated people I believe it affects your overall score adversely.

@jfouts @carolinechen-whatley  I’ve been testing this out on a couple of my own pages… One with purchased likes and one without. I don’t see any difference in how the information from both pages shows up in my stream. I don’t get more postings from the page with more fans and I don’t get less postings from the page with less fans. That being said, What’s the point to buying fans? Other than to have some social proof when someone goes to a page that the page is credible because of the number of fans.

Well I’m basing this on my client’s experience, and I’ve seen it happen in more than one case. My point really is this. Buying Fans isn’t productive. Better to spend the energy in creating real relationships with a small focused and engaged group than think about the numbers.