Since when did buying FB Fans get so complicated?
In the past I have bought a few hundred fans now and then, just to get a little heat for a new fanpage or so I could get a custom URL. I recently started a new company and I needed to get a lot of fans FAST. I had a decent budget so I thought I would just try out a few different companies, and when it was all said and done I thought I would share my experience.
So, I started out on Fiverr. Many of you have no doubt had a buying experience on the site, it's crazy cheap, and seems too good to be true. That's because it is. I was promised 350 real US Facebook fans for my Fiverr. The delivery was supposed to take just 3 days. 5 days later I had gained 265 and lost more than half of them, upon a closer inspection of the users I found them to clearly be bots, aka fake users. Fake users do me no real good. I tried to get my fiverr back, out of general principal, but no luck.
Next I turned to Google. Despite what you may think I found that just because a company has made the first page doesn't necessarily mean they are reputable.
I carefully reviewed several sites before I made my next purchase. I landed on a site called marketingheaven.net. Now, prior to landing here I had been browsing quite a bit and seen many other high pressure fan marketing services. You know the pages, tons of hype, lots of warnings, basically scare tactics to get you not to go anywhere else. What I want to know is how you can justify making a site a series of high pressure sales pages? Not only is it obnoxious, it's also hard to navigate.
The real problem with this site though was the pricing. Too high, and to much talk about "vetting" fans. Just for the heck of it though I emailed them and surprisingly the email bounced immediately. So, they could spend enough time to make a super-hyped up site but failed to put the right email address on the page? No thanks.
Next up was SocialBuzzer.com. This site was much better looking, had a nice flow to it, but the pricing was really really low. They claimed to deliver 100% real fans but we all know that's simply not possible for such a low price. 5,000 fans for $99? It seemed so low I thought I would just give it a shot. I placed the order and about 3 days later started seeing likes. I got all 5,000 likes in about 3 weeks. This was slower than advertised, which is okay, but a little frustrating. A closer look at these fans revealed a mix of real and fake profiles, but the kicker was about a week after full delivery I lost half of them.
I did some digging around and found out that FaceBook had instituted a new policy, after multiple tech news sites reported that 9% of all FaceBoook users were fake, they were now purging fake profiles like there was no tomorrow, which explained the user fallout.
At this point I was just about ready to give up and pay for an expensive PPC campaign.
After reading reviews of many other top sites like fansgalore.com, increaselikes.net, fans4mypage.com, and others and seeing very little that was positive I had pretty much made up my mind to just skip buying fans altogether.
One of my friends that produces music mentioned a site to me he had been using with great success to promote himself, not just buying FaceBook Fans but YouTube Views, Subscribers, Twitter Followers, and even SoundCloud Plays. I had him write down the web address for me and went there on my iphone, which surprisingly loaded the site perfectly.
http://darkcloudpromotion.com
Right away I could tell that this was something different. The site was not only 100% fully functional, free of hype, and easy to browse it was a tribute to modern design as well. However, given my recent fiasco I was still skeptical to buy. So I used the site contact form to inquire about buying an odd number of fans and perhaps not paying by PayPal, since I loathe PayPal.
In less than 4 hours I got an email back from a memeber of the DarkCloud Promotion Team who actually thanked me for contacting them and sent me a reasonably priced quote for the odd number of fans, as well as offering to send me a link to pay with Authorize.net using my debit card. I decided to take the plunge and not only got all the Facebook fans ( aka Likes ) I paid for but all the YouTube views too, and in less time than expected. I was notified by email when the campaign started, and when it was complete, and a month later I still have almost all of the fans on-board.
Since that time I have ordered Twitter Followers as well and it was a similar story there also. All in all I feel pretty fortunate to have stumbled across them. It seems like they keep a low profile to avoid people who don't care about quality and just want the numbers. Their prices are more than fair though, rivaling even the botfarms I found.
I would highly recommend them if you're in the market for Social Media Promotion, especially FaceBooks Fans or Likes.
Take it easy.
