One day at Meoko, we received a surprising e-mail by a Mr. Sergey Sider, founder of a certain PromosoundGroup, who wrote in broken English that he was very interested in doing business with us. What he meant by "business" was for us to really just pay for his “services”. This particular service was a pay for “likes”, not just Facebook likes, but SoundCloud and Resident Advisor ones too.
Intrigued and sill quite shocked, we decided to do a bit of investigation. Searching through the PromosoundGroup site, we discovered that the company also offered promo likes for even more platforms:
PROMOTION FOR:
Beatport
Traxsource
Resident Advisor
SoundCloud
Spotify
Youtube
iTunes
LastFm
Vimeo
Myspace
And the list goes on…
On the website, PromosoundGroup promised that they "have a program for virtually ANY budget" and explained their business model as;
"Internet marketing professionals who understand how to:
· Successfully promote any musical act's work and products (whether's it's music, video, or merchandise)
· Build audience, fan loyalty, and of course, sales.
· Implement proven social media marketing strategies!
· Build likes and fan base with REAL HUMAN users – not fake likes or twitter bots!"
LEGIT SITE?
Sergey’s e-mail, the site and its Facebook page all looked quite dodgy indeed. On PromosoundGroup’s Facebook, a Julien Ruiz commented, “How can we know that the services that you offer are real?” We were asking the same question…It seemed that the site looked more like a scam than an actual business.
We searched the net to see if anyone else posted something about the site’s legitimacy and came back with mixed reviews. According to scamvoid, a site that investigate how safe a page is, claimed that the website seemed safe based on their transparency report, which really just investigated if the site distributed viruses.
FACEBOOK ARTIST PROFILE: DJ CHANG
We decided to make a Facebook page of a certain DJ Chang:
And looked at what PromosoundGroup offered on Facebook:
We decided to buy +1000 real likes. As soon as we made payment, in no more than half an hour, DJ Chang’s profile grew from only 3 likes to a staggering 1007!
The profiles that did like DJ Chang looked pretty real at first glance, until some more stalking did raise some (more) eyebrows. Furthermore, there was no option to write on the people’s pages or write them an e-mail. According to Facebook and a post by Screenpush, these profiles come from “click farms” located in developing countries.
NO BO DY
A Mr. No Bo Dy (no body) who apparently studied at Oxford, liked DJ Chang’s profile. We looked at what other profiles he liked and they seemed real but quite dodgy too (no surprise there):
Profiles included DJs and singers of various backgrounds. DJs included DJ Cleancut and DJ LOONY, and artists such as Daisy Sanchez and Bryanna Trece. We recognized a particular Andrea Faustini, who apparently sang on X Factor.
The one thing they did have in common was that they all had more than 1000 likes.
GLITCHES
There were some glitches in the “service” however. For example, the “real” likes that Sergey did promise were indeed real, but they weren’t interactive. Every time we posted a status update, we received no feedback from the 1011 people that liked our page.
And when we searched for DJ Chang on Facebook, it just showed us 2 likes, not 1011.
These are small glitches however, compared to the 1000 profiles that exist to actually like a profile page.
DON’T DO IT
A “war”, similar to piracy ones between labels and torrents, is going on between Facebook and these sites that offer fake/real likes.
A press release from a Facebook site integrity engineer, Matt Jones explained that even though Facebook likes are great, if they don’t come from real profiles, they don’t do any good.
Screenpush explains that “changes to Facebook’s algorithm have rendered these fake likes as more hindrance than help. Having an overabundance of fake followers on your page can form a barrier between the content your brand posts and the genuine Facebook fans you have out there, who are actually eager to view your content and engage with it.” So, a high number of followers does not mean that these followers will necessarily like or repost any updates.
On a side note, even though Facebook officially bans buying fake likes, the social media site does offer users to pay for promotion, which Facebook calls as an “alternative” to these particular sites. Buying Facebook likes from the social media site itself is a “legitimate” way to buy likes where Facebook promises “to connect with more of the people who matter to you”. Buying likes from sites such as Promosound Group is ‘illegitimate’
According to Facebook and Screenpush, more fake likes means a drop in overall engagement. It is not about the quantity anymore, but quality of those likes that make a successful Facebook page. They are right, but does the public know it? Aren’t people, musicians and artists still judged by the number of followers they have, not the amount of engagement they receive?
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