Facebook Ads or Facebook Fraud?
We found this interesting video from Veritasium in YouTube, about some performed experiments towards how Facebook is really driving the Promoted Ad oriented to get Likes for a Page. Everything started with “Virtual Bagel” a made up page that had a very interesting business model, created by BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones (see full article here). What he found out from the experiment is that if you buy likes the legitimate way, some of the likes were from the places he’d targeted, but the majority of likes were from developing countries such as India, The Philippines, Nepal, and so on. Those are the same countries that have “Click Farms” or, in other words – fake profiles that add likes to your page.
We’re all familiar with this business model, but is it ethical? Some people may think it’s not, while others think it is. The best way to see it is to look at the bigger picture and take in account that those “likes” are not going to get engagement rates going, nor impressions on their pages…because if you do not have a reliable audience, who is consuming your content? So, Facebook forbids outsourcing to companies that promise said likes and instead want you to promote your page through them to get “paid-organic” likes (see more information here). Nothing wrong about that, right?
Here’s the interesting part, Veritasium itself performed a great experiment and created a page about Cats that was plain white, no content and besides was totally awful. You can see the complete video below to watch his results:
For many of us, I’m sure we can agree that it’s very challenging to get likes. Now, putting these experiments into perspective, we no longer know how honest Facebook business model may be. Are they aware that this is even happening? We don’t know for sure. One thing we do know is that they’re pushing for businesses to utilize their ads services more now than ever before. Now, being that this may take a long time to fix, it’s essential to create a new game plan to strive for organic likes.
The smartest solution may be to start thinking about the “I” as a brand, and create ways to drive organic likes to your pages. What would you like to see in a page? What would you share with your friends? Create specialized digital campaigns for all your customers, and take insights from life that could be transformed into measurable results. Here’s a great example on how to mix old advertising models and new digital solutions to drive high engagement rates, feedback and of course likes:
How have you gotten likes over the past year? Do you use Facebook ads to get likes? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester based NY web design firm specializing in SEO, social media, web and graphic design and much more.