Is a Facebook ‘like’ worth it?
A BBC experiment has found that companies may be wasting their money by buying advertising on social-media giant, Facebook, investigating the factor of millions of fake accounts.
Brands and companies place a large amount of value in a Facebook “like”; when a Facebook user likes a company’s page, it gives that company permission to post messages on the user’s feed and send them messages.
It’s a marketing treasure trove.
Facebook, in turn, makes its money by selling advertising to companies which are designed and placed on the site to draw in “likes” from its over 900-million users.
However, BBC News carried out an experiment to investigate the real value of Facebook “likes”, investigating whether the “fans” companies reach are who they’re actually targetting.
The experiment
Facebook had revealed that 5-6% of it’s users might be fake – representing approximately 54 million profiles on the site.
Fake accounts, the BBC reported, “like” as many accounts as possible to build up a big community through which to spam links or trick people into friending them. Facebook still makes money from these fake connections.
Michael Tinmouth, a social media marketing consultant, ran Facebook advertising campaigns for a number of small businesses. At first, he told BBC News, his clients were happy with the results – But became concerned after looking at the “fans” who had clicked on the ads.
The company had been targeting Facebook users around the world, but all their “likes” appeared to be coming from countries such as the Philippines and Egypt.
“They were 13 to 17 years old, the profile names were highly suspicious, and when we dug deeper a number of these profiles were liking 3,000, 4,000, even 5,000 pages,” Tinmouth said.
To test whether this was a once-off occurrence, BBC News created a Facebook page for the fake company, VirtualBagel. Again, “likes” for the company’s page came predominantly from Egypt and the Phillippines, with clearly fake profiles featuring as fans.
Facebook’s response
When BBC News raised the issue with Facebook, the company said that it had “not seen evidence of a significant problem.”
Facebook went further, telling the BBC that the issue had also not been raised by “the many advertisers who are enjoying positive results from using Facebook.”
“All of these companies have access to Facebook’s analytics which allow them to see the identities of people who have liked their pages, yet this has not been flagged as an issue. A very small percentage of users do open accounts using pseudonyms but this is against our rules and we use automated systems as well as user reports to help us detect them.”
BBC: Facebook ‘likes’ and adverts’ value doubted
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