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Buying Friends Cool or Nah? - Since Facebook launched 10 years ago and other social media platforms emerged like Twitter and Instagram, the demand for friends and followers has gone up. Celebrities, businesses and even the U.S. State Department have purchased bogus Facebook likes via “click farms” who employee people to like and follow social media accounts. Want to know how your friend has 20K friends? Read more to go inside the click farm industry. — Dominique Zonyéé (@DominiqueZonyee)(Photo: Alejandro Rivera/Getty Images)

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What Are All the Clicks About? - If you are on any form social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Tumblr, you want people to follow or like you and your content. But if you are not Beyoncé, Kanye West or Oprah Winfrey, how do you get people to follow you? (Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

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What Is a Click Farm? - The theory says the more likes and followers you have, the more other people will like and follow your pages. Off-shore click farms such as Unique IT World in Dhaka, Bangladesh, employ workers to manually click on clients' social media pages. Essentially, farm workers devote the work day to tapping the thumbs-up button, viewing videos or retweeting comments to inflate social media numbers.(Photo: J. Emilio Flores /Landov)

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The Cost to Buy “Fake” Friends - Sites like Buy Plus Followers sells 250 Google+ shares and followers for $12.95. Sites such as Frutal advertise sales for purchasing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers, with prices starting at $10 for 500 Instagram or Twitter followers. Sites like Buy Plus Followers sells 250 Google+ shares and followers for $12.95. (Photos from left: Twitter, Oleg Prikhodko/Getty Images)

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Everyone Needs Friends, Even the State Department - The State Department, which has 400,000 likes, vowed in 2013 to discontinue purchasing likes after the inspector general blasted the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.(Photo: RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/GettyImages)

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How to Detect if Someone Is Buying Fake Followers - If you see an account that jumps from 1,000 to several thousand seemingly overnight, you can almost guarantee they are most likely purchasing fake followers. To see if someone has fake Twitter followers, visit Status People Fake Follower here.(Photo: Stockbyte/Getty Images)

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Is This a Viable Business? - Researchers estimated in 2013 that sales of fake Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $40 million to $360 million so far. Additionally, fake Facebook activities bring in $200 million a year.(Photo: Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

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Duping Social Media - Software used to generate clicks and likes attempts to dupe social media with codes created to go around the traditional way to get likes from real people. However, tech giants like YouTube, Google and Twitter counteracted the software and began regularly sweeping user accounts.(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

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The Buying Backlash - YouTube deleted billions of music industry video views last December after auditors found some videos apparently had exaggerated numbers of views. Twitter and Facebook also monitor accounts for trumped up social media counts. "In the end, their accounts are suspended, they're out the money and they lose the followers," Twitter Inc. spokesman Jim Prosser said.(Photo: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images)

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How You Like Me Now? - Purchasing fake likes and friends can destroy your credibility. Fake followers do not interact with your profile and real followers may become aware of the jump in likes or followers and ultimately leave your page.(Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Photo By Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

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The Solution - Try to gain fans and followers on your social media page the natural way. Post engaging information and communicate with your followers with constant activity.(Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)