Like for Like?

If not, will you at least buy my book?

I haven’t arrived at a decision on this, but I thought I’d throw it out to the interwebz and see what came back.  What cliché stuck to the wall.  See how high the ball bounced, as it were.

As an author, I have an author page on Facebook (please "like" me!).  This page only gets sporadic traffic at best, which is ok.  Some fans and friends comment about blog articles I’ve written, or ask me questions.  Good stuff.  The page does what it should.

Occasionally, like today, I get a “like for like” request from another author I've usually never heard of and never read.

It’s the latter that I’m interested in discussing.

“Like for like” requests, for the uninitiated, are reciprocal “likes” on author or book pages.  If you check out my page, you’ll see I have 667 “likes”.  On the face of it, this should mean that 667 people have sought me out and are following my page, hanging on my every word and wondering when my next book will be released.  The reality is that most of those who “like for like” turn off the “following” and thus defeat the whole purpose of liking an author’s page.  For the sheer volume, I've found myself doing the same, and essentially, I'm just padding out their numbers, and they're padding mine.  The true “followers” are a mere fraction (and you guys SO ROCK!).

Just because I "unfriend" you in Facebook
doesn't mean we're not friends in real life.

I don’t know this to be certain, but as I have 667 “likes” but have sold under 100 copies of my book, this seems logical (especially as the book is now on sale for a mere $2.99!).

So, I’m curious if you, good reader, have had the same experience.  Have you found these reciprocal likes to be beneficial?  I’m told Facebook looks at this number and uses it in one of those mystical, magical algorithms to feed suggestions to other users, but at a certain point, isn’t it just so much fluff?

Basically, should I continue “like for like” or should I adopt a “thanks, but no thanks” policy?

Maybe I’m just in a bad mood today.