And how it can hurt your page, be it on Facebook, Twitter or MSN

 

For starters a Click farm is click fraud.  A large group of low paid workers are paid small sums of mony--a dollar per thousand clicks on a website, usually an advertising site.  These clicks can be likes, or clicking on the ads themselves or clicking on subscriptions.  Often these clicks are done by bots.

 

Fake likes on sites like Facebook come from click farms. To deal with this Facebook is trying to create algorithims that seek to wipe out accounts with suspicious activities such as liking too many pages at one go.

 

Click farms tend to located in developing countries such as India, Bangledesh, and the Phillipines.   These farms target sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and PInterest. They sell their likes to willing customers.  I have noticed it the most on Facebook in the form of Boosting and Promoting posts on pages.  It's the very worst thing you can do for your page and here is why.

 

Fake likes are usually bots or these click farm workers that get paid a dollar per 1000 likes.  They are not going to comment on your page posts.  The page gets circulated through shares and comments.  Not likes.  People tend to ignore a post that has 347 likes on it.  They won't comment on it.  Basic human psychology.  Facebook members who perchase Click Farm services have seen thier post engagement plummet.  IT has been said that up to 20 percent of the likes on Facebook are fake likes from these click farms.  One way you can guard agianst this--that is depending on the target audience of your page or site, is that you can make the page only visable to developed countries.  I run a military aircraft page.  The target audience is going to the US and Canada.  So the page is visable to those regions and it reduces the fake likes.  I know targeting as such is not going to be possible on all types of pages.  So the page manager will have to go through the members that join.  Does the profile show that the user is interested in the subject?  If the profile shows no connection whatsoever, the like is probably fake and it is safe to delete the member.

 

 

Yet there are folks on these sites that are addicted to collecting likes.  They think it will boost their image.  So the Click Farms stay in business.

 

This piece on Wikipedia is pretty informative on Click Farms.  It goes into more detail than this post.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_farm