The world oldest and most known fact in the business world is that “money brings more money” which can also be translated as “customers bring more customers”. This is a quite simple fact, that is based on the rule that people talk and share their buying and business experiences with each others, which will eventually lead them to your business.
In the modern online world, sharing personal experiences on business and shopping has even more value nowadays when you can share your experience with thousands of people just by clicking a single link or liking a single page in internet or Facebook.
In the “old days”, that is, days before social media, you would either meet your friends or colleague in face to face (or by phone) and share your thoughts and your experiences with them. Although this kind of grapevine and networking has already been effective for very many years, it has very little value when it is compared to the modern online social networking.
As stated, nowadays you do not even need to see your friends or colleagues face to face or even call to them – They will know your new favorite shop or restaurant in the same very moment you walk into it if you are using automated location based logging such as Facebook places or Foursquare or only by few minutes later when they use their smart phones and either “like” the restaurant or update their Facebook/Twitter statuses about where they are or show they have experienced their contact with the business in hand.
This kind of social networking and marketing which comes with it has both good and bad sides: The good side is that your business gets instantly “word on the street” and for a one visiting client in your facility can bring his or hers few hundred friends to do the shopping also.
The down side is that if there is even a small incident in your business which could will cause a even small or mediocre negative imago to your life’s work, everybody, in the near thousand miles, will know instantly exaggerated version of just how “shitty” your business is before you can even whisper the words “damage control”.
Although, even with both good and down sides, online social networking and marketing can be a powerful tool when used correctly – and sometimes you do not even need people to visit your business or even know about it how it is: You just need to have little bit of practical online knowledge and few bucks to make your business to be “liked” by thousands or tenth-of-thousands people.
Yes – You can buy people to like you even if they have not ever heard about you or done any business with you. A growing element in recent years of online social marketing has been sites, which allow you both to buy and trade Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Youtube views as well as several other online sharing and bookmarking status symbols.
These services, few to mention, such as Friendrise or Youlikehits, provide a layer for people to gain either “likes” by “liking” (or following/viewing/googleplussing) other sites and then use gathered points, usually individuals to the trading service, you have gained from it to offer people possibility to like your site/service/twitter/video .. or you could just buy these points with hold, hard cash (well, with “credit card cash”), and in a week gain 1.000-1.000.000 likes to your Facebook-page or video if you do the thing correctly.
Before I hear “What the h*ll, this is scamming!” I can assure, that even though people “liking your business” may not actually like it, it is just one mean to do the business marketing. Getting people to “like you” and passively spreading word without actually liking you is not a very new method of business marketing – it just might be the the oldest.
Does it work then? Just ask yourself – Would you buy a car from a car dealer who is liked by two people or from the one who is liked by two thousand people. It does not matter is the popularity real or fake, it is just a popularity.
There is also a other side of the coin to gain in addition to cool “like button numbers” in your Facebook-page or website, or huge followers-count in twitter which would encourage people to like or follow you also – Friend and friend of the friend these people you have gained “fake likes” from will see your business and may just actually start to really like you.
Is it expensive then? Well, if your business can afford 50-400 dollars to get popularity of even 10.000 likes, I would not say so. You can even achieve same artificial like-count without paying anything – you just need to do some clicking and liking by yourself to get the same “like credits” you would get by buying them with 300 bucks.
So, next time you see that a Youtube video has got 200.000 views in a single weekend or Facebook page/website got 10.000 likes quickly it may be viral, an actually a good video and/or .. well .. maybe they have just bought it.
