Here’s the story. I have a Facebook fanpage for my business site. I didn’t really know much about social media marketing so I hired a friend who claimed he was an expert on this. Big mistake. He seemed knowledgeable at first glance, and the Facebook page quickly stated gaining fans. Too quickly. As it turned out, most of the “fans” he brought were fakes. Unfortunately I fell for his sweet talk for far too long, and the result is that the fanpage has now 12000 fans, of which I suspect 60-70% are fakes. I fired him finally but the damage has already been done.
So right now the fanpage is pretty much unusable. If I choose to promote any post, most of the money is wasted on promoting to fake profiles. I was wondering what to do in such situation. One solution which came to my mind would be to go over the whole fan list and delete everyone whose first/last name is not found in our client database. Not easy with 12000 fans and 80000 customers in database but doable. Unfortunately, Facebook does not let me see the list of all fans, only the last 500 ones. So after I find 500 first real users, I can no longer search for fakes.
So right now I see only two options - delete all the fans and tell real users to like the page again, or delete the whole fanpage and create a new one, and then tell real users to like it again. The second solution is much quicker, but I would probably loose my fanpage address this way and will not be able use it on the new fanpage.
This while thing is a mess. I would really appreciate your insights.