The invention of social media has opened the world up to us in ways never before imaginable to past generations. When we look at concepts such as the telegraph, telephone and traditional mail, social media blows all of these out of the water in terms of its speed and effectiveness. Even when compared to email, social media offers plenty of advantages and benefits not found anywhere else. Facebook is the most popular platform for social media users, with roughly one billion users currently on the network. When you advertise on Facebook for likes, you may discover that many of your likes from campaigns are fraudulent or are being abused if you pay by ad click. How can you avoid this fate? Below, we have put together some simple solutions that can help you minimize this likelihood and build legitimate likes on Facebook.

Target Isolated Areas

One of the best ways to limit the likelihood of abuse of your Facebook campaigns is to ensure that you are pinging users by location in smaller numbers. Many people prefer to create multiple campaigns that seek to test out performance across cities, countries and continents. Even if you are not worried about the subtle differences in how your campaigns perform on this side of the globe or the other, you can ensure that abuse is minimized by setting a maximum dollar amount for each. In cases like this, you can still spend just as much as you normally would on a daily basis, but avoid the likelihood of a competitor or spambot eating up all of your daily budget.

Target Your Niches

If you want legitimate fans who are likely to interact with your brand in the future, then you must target your business or brand’s niche. While Facebook pits competitors against one another and results in advertising manipulations, you also need to ensure that the “legitimate” likes you do receive are from people who in fact are interested in your product. Sometimes, marketing campaigns on social media will attempt to lure someone in with a reference to another type of product or service. If your business is not being transparent with its marketing, then it is very likely wasting its time. Only focus on the niches that will be interested in what you have to offer if you want your likes to amount to more than a simple number.

Promote Existing Content

You may be tempted to create Facebook ads from scratch to use in your marketing efforts, but research shows that paid advertising that uses existing posts and multimedia from your Facebook page performs much better. Not only will you be able to be pinging users’ status feeds, but your ads will show up on the right-hand side as well, if you so choose. As advertising becomes more commonplace on social media, tactics that use existing content and elements that are interesting to the reader will outperform traditional advertising, much of which users have subconsciously blocked before they even see it. One good idea is to view your Facebook posts’ performance metrics via the page to see which ones naturally performed best, and then use those.