Music Forums

Okay, something fishy is going on in SoundCloud land! As you guys know, we decided to upload some of the songs from the Music Library on to SoundCloud. Turns out - we didn’t have enough space with our free account, so we decided to purchase a Pro Membership. As I began to upload each song, I noticed that the songs started getting ‘likes’. Of course I was excited...until I noticed that the ‘likes’ were coming from bogus accounts. Such as ‘Jon 1214’ whose profile pic says, “purchase 10,000 SoundCloud likes”. What the hec!?!? I mean, is this what SoundCloud resorted to? Once someone purchases their Pro Membership, they are bombarded by fake likes & followers? Ugh, it really pissed me off – if I would have known this ahead of time, I wouldn’t have bothered upgrading to their Pro account. It triggered a memory though; I remember something very similar happened on Facebook. A few months ago I signed into our Facebook account - when up pops a message! The message stated that we could promote our page by targeting a specific audience, hence bringing that audience to our site & possibly attracting some new members. This came with a price of course (very similar to SoundCloud) but we figured it might be worth it. As soon as we paid Facebook to start this promotion campaign, we noticed we started getting ‘likes’ and ‘friend’ requests from odd accounts. All of them were foreign accounts with absolutely no content on them – only a picture. I didn’t understand what the hec was going on, but soon realized it after I did some research on Google about Facebook advertising. Below is the video I found about this scam – and it is EXACTLY what happened to us! Sigh…I feel defeated and bad for all the other schmucks (like myself) who got swindled by them. How on earth are they getting away with this? They have more money than God, why do they need to bamboozle us poor folk? Have any of you ever experienced this? Please share!

Yikes! Click farms? The lack of engagement from those types of "likes" can really work against you. Unfortunately, Facebook is more interested in developing things like facial recognition instead of discovering and removing bogus accounts which boost their ad revenue. Hopefully, it's only a matter of time before advertisers demand better results.

I know, it's absolutely crazy to know they are doing this! :/

As someone working in social media and online marketing I cry inside when I see people actually liking the concept of 'buying' engagment for their content and platforms. There is no returns on it whatsoever (skipping the fact that ways to measure ROI for social is nonexistent, but only guessable). Click farms should be traced by the social media enterprises and taken down. Also accounts who use them (I mean really buy into it, not just getting likes to lure them in), should be made less visible in e.g. the Facebook news feed (this works via a very complicated algorithm). For a fact, Facebook already does this for like-bashing. When people ask for likes, shares or comments they will not reach as many people (even with sponsoring budget) as posts that stay away from this dreadful content.

Yes, I had a long day at work and had to get this out. Hope you all can live with that. ;)

Yep, it's very discouraging and misleading! Facebook has a big pop-up that says, "Promote Your Site" - and naive me says, "Oh cool, Thank you!" - then pays these cats to create a campaign, which I had to set up myself. They make you go through this whole spiel, from targeting countries and states and choosing what type of audience fits your site's content, etc.

All of that, just to give you a few 'fake' likes? And it is sooooooo obvious that they are fake because if you go to their pages, they are from countries (that I did not target) and have no content on their pages! They just go around liking things.

How freakin' absurd is that? I mean, why am I paying for a campaign that is bogus? Very tricky and deceiving - not to mention embarrassing! :/

Hmmm that's weird. Facebook's advertising should work normally and shouldn't give you any fake likes... Interesting!

They were all fake likes - unless all of those people actually were interested in ProCollabs? But if that were the case, why haven't they signed up, or at least engaged in anything I post on the Facebook page. And they have no content on their pages, just a picture.

That's super weird. I'm gonna have a look at this tomorrow. We use fb ads for some of our big clients. And we really get good results from our targeting and sponsor budget.

I'd rather have a real "hate it" than a thousand fake likes. I bought some for an experiment account a couple of years ago and tried engaging the "developing world people" that actually worked the click farms, and actually got some engagement. Some of those people are real and do it for the pennies. The Philippines and Turkey were most prevalent at the time, but it is not a recipe for marketing success.

@tomdegroot - I was privy to it very early on, so once I researched it, I stopped my campaign - apparently the more you pay them, the better the results. So if you are spending thousands of dollars, you'll probably have better results. We had a much lower budget, so all we got out of it were some likes from bogus accounts.

@markalandooley - oh wow, that is a great experiment. I wish I would have had knowledge of click farms before actually investing money. But all in all, it happened and I learned from it. :)