If you set up a campaign on Facebook in the simplest way to get likes for your page, the majority of the likes will come from completely irrelevant sources. Of course, Facebook benefits from this right away, but it can never be good in the long term.
If you run a Facebook campaign without doing thorough work to filter the audience, you’ll get a ton of garbage clicks, to the point that a more conspiracy-minded entrepreneur might guess that Facebook encourages it. If you’re not extremely careful about filtering out irrelevant groups, it’s not enough to just target Sweden and the Swedish language—often, the majority of likes will come from profiles that clearly aren’t interested (or aren’t real people). Isn’t it time for Facebook to address this problem?
We have stopped all campaigns aimed at increasing likes. The reason is precisely what I described above: fake likes have been overwhelmingly dominant in some cases. Despite targeting settings where we focus on Sweden and only people who speak Swedish, we’ve received likes from people in all sorts of countries who clearly aren’t interested in online marketing in Sweden or in our business. People who speak Swedish, Portuguese, Russian, and Serbian, but live in Iraq and like business-related topics. Naturally, Facebook themselves aren’t behind the bots (because that’s what they are), but shouldn’t they be making an effort to clean this up?
We’ve just chosen to launch a new campaign with very narrow settings, hoping to get a few genuine likes. Otherwise, I firmly recommend not sending any money to Facebook until they take action on this. What do you think?
Magnus Bråth
CEO
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.