Odd Facebook Author Page Likes?

Al X.

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I guess this is probably about as good of a place as any to post this, and I -think- it's a technical issue, so...

Here's the situation. I have a Facebook author page that I set up, maybe about a year ago. I do not have a huge amount of 'friends', maybe thirty or so, mostly in the Continental US. My author market targets the United States.

For some time, I've been getting a series of random page 'likes' from individuals I have no connection with whatsoever, and no obvious connections to any of my 'friends.' They are mostly East Indian, young, male, and students.

I didn't think much of it at first (and by the way, I welcome any and all exposure) but I've been noticing a pattern. SOME of these East Indian, young, male, students, not apparently heterosexual, hailing from different parts of India, look like they might be possibly the SAME DUDE. Timelines have multiple repeated posts, in semi-English gibberish. What this leads me to suspect is that someone, possibly Facebook itself, is using like-bots from fake automated accounts. There has been no interest in any of my books on the Indian market save for a handful of page reads once back when I was in the Amazon KU program.

Why? I don't know. I have 'boosted' a couple posts and Facebook actively encourages me to boost more from time to time, maybe to stimulate interest?

Anybody have any insight on this? Or am I just reading something in to that which isn't there? Again, I'm happy to see the positive exposure, it just seems illogical to me.
 

Al X.

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Oh, just as an FYI update, I posted the same question on another board, and apparently odd, irrelevant likes by primarily East Indian accounts appear to be a 'thing' on author pages. At least one other person reported the same thing.
 

Matera the Mad

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Aside from the ethnicity and gender, random likers could be seeking attention. Most likely they have something to sell. At any rate, this is a pattern on Twitter, where clonebots do a lot of randomish liking. I won't go into all the details, but I block them.
 

insolentlad

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I've been getting these too. Some Indian but more of them female and from the Philippines. These latter do seem to be real people who post regularly and have lots of friends, so who knows?
 

lizmonster

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Funny, I always get the Russian guys who want to know if I'm married.

ETA: Having actually engaged in a conversation with one, I'd say with 99% certainty you're dealing with bots. If any of them bother you directly, you can block them, but otherwise I wouldn't waste much time worrying about it.
 
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JDlugosz

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I’ve seen a video about buying likes/upvotes on social media. If the company only upvoted its clients, it would be discovered as such. So they upvote many other things as well. In your case, a public thing could be expected to have more votes and votes from stragers, so Authors are a targer.

BTW, I get masses of sign-ups for my band Wordpress site, with batches of accounts that are separed by 2 minutes.
 

BenPanced

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A gay man I know keeps getting messages and friend requests from spam bots blonde Russian women with enormous busts.
 

EMaree

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I get a lot of young East Asian guys adding me, and leaving ambiguous messages to the page inbox like 'Hi' (or :thumbsup: Facebook icons) which feel a lot like starters to a conversation with a bot.

I ignore them, but honestly it's not because they're very likely to be bots -- it's because back in 2013 one of these random 'likes' responded to my 'Hi' with a scan of a very obscure magazine page article, where I was interviewed at age 13 and the photographer's angle put the focus on my scoop-neck top. I'd never seen this article before, it was an academic publication. The photo itself wasn't risque, nothing was shown that I'd have batted an eyelid at on any kid that age, but the person messaging clearly found it interesting enough to hunt me down almost a decade later.

Sigh. Sometimes you learn the hard way what it's like being a woman on the internet.
 
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gimli

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hi

These are bots or fake profiles for the most part. The reason they behave like this is because Facebook has started assigning a sort of ranking to social media accounts based on their behaviour. In the bigger scheme of things once these accounts gain enough, "credibility" either the account or like's from the social media account ( which now mean more to google than a spam profile ) are sold as a way to increase a websites ranking in the serps.