Boy do I feel naive.
Facebook announced it’s going to crack down on “inauthentic likes”. If you’re not Facebook-friendly, allow me to explain. When a business or group (or in my case, book) has its own page, people can click “like” on it to subscribe to updates. Occasionally you will arrive at a page for some enterprise and see they have thousands of likes. Sometimes it’s surprising. Well thanks to my tech-savvy Toronto friend Maurice, I’ve been clued into the fact that they pay for many of those clicks of approval.
Yes, there are companies that sell likes! They have people on stand-by to click on whatever they’re told to click on. The company pays for the service so it will look more popular. Some pages have been dropping by several thousand “likes” within a day as Facebook roots out these services and deletes the accounts associated with them.
Sometimes people follow me on Twitter for the sole purpose of having me follow them in turn. If they look half-way interesting I will do that, as a thank-you for the follow. Occasionally some will follow me, blast me with a message telling me to buy their book (they’re mostly self-published authors) and then unfollow so I can’t respond. I block them immediately but inwardly thank them for a lesson in what not to do on social media. It’s got to be give and take. But it shouldn’t be bought.
You mean, the cheque isn’t actually in the mail? Oh, how disappointing.