Why I dislike Facebook 'LIKE' contests

When will I ever learn?

I thought I had already sworn off online voting contests after I witnessed cheating firsthand at Multiply.com two years ago. It was a video contest for a well-known milk brand. The top ten entries with the most votes would win a year’s supply of milk. The contest lasted for three months. During that period, participants found an auto-vote script that would continuously generate votes for their entries if they left their computers on. The prize was worth around P45,000. It became a contest of who had the most computers left on during the voting period.

But then some time ago, I found myself joining FB "LIKE" contests.

Anyone who's active on Facebook would know that prizes are being given away by companies left and right. Contests can come in the form of an online raffle, a speed contest (first to reply), or more often than not, a voting contest that counts the number of "LIKES" an entry gets. All one has to do to garner a vote is to have someone click on "LIKE." In effect, it doesn't matter if your entry is crappy, so long as you get the most number of “LIKES,” you win.

It makes sense for companies to conduct a "LIKE" contest because for all intents and purposes, it helps them recruit more followers and community members for their respective pages. It's really one of the quickest ways to pump up the fan figures to epic proportions... or so it seems.

Below is a screenshot I took of the likers of a certain entry in an FB “LIKE” contest. I will not name the company, the prize, or the contestant but I am posting this here so you can see for yourself:

What do you think?

There will always be people who would resort to cheating to win, to get a freebie, or to make quick buck. That's reality. Anyone who can register for a free email account can register for a free Facebook account. If you have nothing better to do with your time, you can easily come up with a hundred dummy accounts for vote-padding purposes. I just hope the companies holding these contests would be able to monitor the votes that come in and award the prizes to those who campaigned the old-fashioned way. But then again, I’ve seen FB pages with fans running up to six-digit numbers. How do you check out something like 50,000-plus FB accounts one by one? Contestants who garner genuine likes from real FB accounts will always be on the losing end. I’ve even heard of a program that can automatically generate hundreds of likes without FB accounts attached to them. What good are numbers if they’re not accurate?

The headaches don’t even stop there. After the voting period, there’s always a possibility that some irate fans will raise allegations of cheating and vote-padding. By then, the company will find itself in a tight spot. I’ve actually witnessed people fight over a gift pack containing three bottles of lotion on FB from a “LIKE” contest.  It will be messy. It will be a PR disaster. It will usually entail emergency measures like increasing the number of winners or giving out tokens in order to appease the offended parties. Either way, it’s not really gaining anyone’s goodwill.

If you're a company that's striving to make your presence felt on Facebook, is this the kind of community you'd like to nurture? Would it even count as a reliable gauge of your fan or customer base? FB “LIKE” contests encourage the creation of dummy accounts and employing dubious ways of generating votes. Personally, if I were managing a company FB fan page, I would much rather have a hundred real fans than a thousand fake ones.