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Does it even make sense to buy Facebook likes? Your engagement numbers get destroyed if your fans aren't active.
Is it better to have no likes? While it does give a slight hit on engagement, the increase in the amount of people who are willing to like your page increases dramatically, resulting in actual engagement much quicker.
Yes, it is. There are ways to build authentic engagement and attention. The only usable situation for this is for prototyping at scale: if youre software needed to stress test reading through a fan page with x number of fans or likes in order to understand how it works.

Otherwise it's no different than fixing your books, cheating on your taxes, modding your console so you can have better performance in leaderboards, etc. And activity like this will put a black mark against your startu for years to come.

By the volume of the demand for this, I was under the impression that a lot of startups were doing it and that it was commonplace for PR firms.
That's pure evil and will come around to bite you in the butt.
how so? We are just trying to help small businesses get their social up and running :)
Because the users will be useless, the count is just a proxy for engagement but there will be done due to the users you bring.
You could actually get those small businesses booted off Facebook once Facebook gets its fraud detections algorithms in order (i.e. on a par with those of, say, Google). Which probably isn't too far off.

Same comment goes for all other services of this nature out there.

There will be absolutely ZERO return on your customers' investment.
What is unique about this? There are thousands of services online that offer the same. What makes your site any better?

Moreover, this is not at all relevant to the HackerNews community.

If you can share valuable insights as to why this is a good or bad thing for businesses to do, then that might be more useful.

A lot of people on HN are starting companies and trying to establish themselves with social media(twitter, facebook, etc.). This gives them the jumpstart they need to get their pages and handles running.

People don't like to follow a handle or like a page that has very few likes. Getting those first 1000 followers or 500 likes makes a huge difference in the amount of people who actually end up hitting "follow" or "like"

What I don't really like to follow are people or brands with less than 10 posts. I absolutely hate the ones with zero posts :)
500 likes on the website and checkout goes to 1000? what is going on these days
I would rather have 500 facebook likes than zero, building a fan page sucks!
Great, now we just need someone to start selling paying users. I'm sure people would pay for that. Or else they can just use their own service and observe unbounded growth.
For context: this group just presented at the AngelHack SF Hackathon (I'm one of the judges).

It's funny, but Twitter will clearly drop the hammer on this. It's bad for the ecosystem overall.