Facebook Likes, What are your thoughts on people begging for them?

[Ant71]

Hi There,

I'm seeing more and more businesses (especially small businesses) setting up Facebook pages and then almost begging people to like them with lines such as "lets see if we can get to 200 likes", etc etc.

What are your thoughts on this does it really help and do you think Google will find a way to not count them as spammy?

[josh-riley]

I think that if you can't naturally get likes and have to ask for them, then there's bigger business issues to address. But given that they can't make a value proposition as to why I should like their page, I don't expect these people to be smart marketers.

[littlesthobo]

I don't like to see people asking for likes, it does sound kind of desperate.  There are also lots of groups on Facebook where people help each other out by liking each others pages.  In fact, I think there are even groups on linked in geared around getting people to like each other.

On balance, most of the people I have spoken to don't like to be asked for likes.  The want to like a page because they like a page.

As far as I understand it, likes, plus ones etc don't really count for a great deal in social signals.  Shares, retweets are believed to carry more weight.

I've attached a link to an interesting article on social signals, breaking them down into post, comment, vote (like, +1), reshare and bookmark.

http://socialmediatoday.com/danaraam/1233876/google-social-signals-map-you-didn-t-know-existed

Hopefully this will give some food for thought.  I think we need to keep a close eye on social signals.

I will say though, that I pulled off an interesting report on a client the other day and found a site with low DA and PA but had been +1'd a few times (and liked) and it was surprising higher up the rankings than sites with far higher DA and PA and better on page reports (A's and B's)

[Jinx14678]

"What are your thoughts on this does it really help and do you think Google will find a way to not count them as spammy?"

This really is not "spammy" possibly not the best marketing tactic, but hard to call it spammy, as this person most likely only has a base of friends and family anyway. So it is well within the "community" basis Facebook rules are based in.

But I do agree, that this is not a tactic as what "value" is this business providing by posting this to users - What is the reason they want to get to 200 likes, and how can they tie that to a campaign would be a way I would look at it.