Facebook Advertising Campaigns Generate Fake Likes

Many people know you can buy Facebook Likes by the thousands through devious 3rd parties running click-farms. To understand a click-farm, picture a warehouse full of low-wage workers Liking pages all day every day.  It sounds like it might be a good idea unless you know that buying these bulk Likes negatively impacts your Facebook business profile due to it’s negative impact on fan Engagement.

Engagement refers to a like, comment, or share of your post or ad. Your Engagement is dramatically impacted by bulk purchases of fake fans because fake fans will never Engage (either Like, comment, or share) with your brand again. The problem is Facebook tests and uses your Engagement rate to decide where and how often to show your posts and ads. To test Engagement, Facebook first shows your new posts or ads to a small sample set of your fans. If the engagement is low, because of all the fake fans, your content may never even Reach your real fans.

What is truly shocking is legitimate Facebook advertising campaigns are likely to suffer the same fate of a plunging Engagement rate. Why? It turns out legitimate advertising campaigns on Facebook also receive tons of Likes from the same click-farms.  But, why? Why would click-farm employees click on your ads if you aren’t paying them to do so?

Researcher Jaron Schneider has found the answer. Click-farms know that if everybody in the warehouse is clicking only on the same few pages of their paying customers then it will be obvious to Facebook these Likes are being generated by a click-farm. So, employees of click-farms are told to Like legitimate advertising campaigns as well to mask their behavior as a click-farm. By doing this they make it very difficult for Facebook’s software to figure out which Likes are real and which came from a click-farm.

As if you had purchased bulk-likes, the fake likes generated by your legitimate Facebook ad campaigns will now serve as an obstacle between your content and your real fans. And, Facebook does not offer any way to delete these fake fans in bulk to resolve your problem.

The unfortunate conclusion at this time is three-fold. Legitimate Facebook advertising is likely to reduce Engagement with your real fans. Advertising budgets are being drained by clicks from click farms, and campaign performance indicators are being inflated.

Follow this link below for more details on this research from Veritasium.