As part of the ongoing plan of Facebook to monetize the Social Media behemoth the company recently began running advertisements in the profile streams of users, a move that has been met with mixed reaction from the Facebook user community. Users of social media overall generally dislike advertisements of any kind but those utilizing business pages on Facebook have experimented with the ads in order to gain more likes to their pages. According to some who have been testing the new ad platform the results are not what they appear to be on the surface with one e-commerce company, Limited Run, claiming that eighty percent of the clicks from the new ad service are from bots!
Limited Run, unable to verify the clicks they were being charged for built their own analytics program and page logger to track the ads and found that bots were loading pages which was costing them a fortune in fake ad clicks and after not getting a response from Facebook they are actually deleting their account. The company has been unable to prove who owns the bots and they are not going as far as to say that Facebook is behind the false clicks but they have stopped spending their advertising dollars on the ad service.
It has been reported that over fifty million Facebook accounts are fake ones created by bots purely to be utilized for liking pages. Another recent experiment by the BBC in which they set up a page for a nonexistent bagel company further demonstrates that the Facebook advertising platform is subject to abuse from bots as the fake company received over three thousand likes from “supposed” fans from a ten dollar ad campaign.
Further investigation into some of the profiles of the fake “likers” has revealed that while most of them have been created to appear real with actual profile pictures and activity levels some of them only had activity that showed them answering Facebook surveys and polls and of course liking pages. Some of these “poser” profiles didn’t even have profile photos and had no apparent connection that would indicate a propensity to like the pages they had liked yet many had over 10,000 likes at a rate of over 500 likes per month! According to some who have been researching the apparent false clicks there are some of these fake profiles that seem to like every page possible with more than five likes per minute and totaling nearly 800 likes per month.
Obviously there will need to be some kind of investigation done by Facebook to resolve this issue in order for businesses to feel comfortable using their ad platform. After having the third biggest Initial Public Offering with their stock going public they are also going to have to address the issue to stockholders who may feel duped with fake revenue numbers that cannot be sustained through any regulatory investigation.
As one who has been marketing online since 1993 I have seen many changes and am aware that there are numerous foreign companies that focus on utilizing bots and sell these services to companies who use them to make their pages appear more popular than they are. The only solution is to make Facebook profiles be verified by a phone number of some other method as some other platforms do. It will be interesting to see how Facebook addresses this issue going forward.
SEO | Social Media | Local Marketing | Mobile | Gregg Hall 