This is something I’ve been wanting to share with people for a long time. I’ve seen many run into the pitfalls of ‘paying’ for fans before and I can assure you, it never ends well. It will stop you gaining true fans and it’s a sure-fire way of never getting a promoter to book you.
Let’s say you’re just starting out as a DJ or producer, you’ve set up some social pages but you haven’t got many likes yet. It’s very easy to look at other DJs and think ‘how have they got X amount of fans?!’, if it’s a successful page, one thing’s for sure – they won’t have paid for it!
How can it mess up my page?
The answer is simple really. Facebook uses a number of metrics to calculate what content should get seen by their users these include things like how new is the post, how ‘close’ you are with the person posting etc. If a post reacts well and gets liked, shared and commented on Facebooks algorithm (known as Edgerank) will give that post more visibility in people’s feeds.
It makes sense when you think about it, Facebook want to keep their users (us) happy. In order to keep people happy you need to keep them entertained. By showing users popular content it’s more likely to keep them coming back, which makes Facebook more £££.
Here’s the juicy bit. Let’s say you have 2k fans – half of which are real, but the other half you paid for and are most probably fake. You post a new video of you cooking up a new tune in the studio that real fans should enjoy.
Your page has 2,000 fans of which half are active (1,000). Your post now has half as much chance of being seen by (a) your fans and (b) other people. The algorithm Facebook use to calculate Edgerank will see that 1,000 fans are NOT engaging with your post, therefore it will assume it’s probably not very good content – even if it is you posting a wicked new track you’ve made that the real fans would love!
This lack of engagement from fans has a snowball affect, soon your page won’t have any engagement, and none of your REAL fans will actually get to see your posts. Promoters aren’t stupid and they’ll see you’ve paid for likes before. This is a big red flag for them – and they’ll never book you.
You may have seen a lot of marketing gimics online, things like “buy 1000 organic facebook fans today. My advice to you is to be very wary of these, the music industry is a tough one to crack and ‘buying’ fans is a simple way of making it even tougher.
Hope this helps.
Danny
SO true! Also all those fans can be reverse engineered into emails for your mailing list online.