How To Avoid Fake Facebook Likes: What The Veritasium Video Doesn't Tell You

Popular science blogger, Derek Muller of Veritasium, released a YouTube video that highlights a problem with the Facebook advertising ecosystem. Derek’s experiment was also well covered by Mashable.

In his experiment, Derek tested Facebook Like ads as a method of generating Fans for his Facebook Page, Virtual Cat, and subsequently discovered that the majority of the new Likes that he garnered were (most likely) fraudulent.  He theorizes that they are the result of “click farms”, shady pay-per-like service providers operated out of developing countries who deliver thousands of likes for pennies on the dollar, typically from fraudulent user accounts.

This is not a new problem.  It has been widely reported over the past few years: here, here and here.

There is no doubt that this issue is a problem for Facebook.  Ultimately if they want to continue to woo marketers and maintain their position as online advertising’s belle of the ball, Facebook will need to continue to purge their network of fake accounts.  They've done this before and have committed to continuing to do this to maintain the integrity of the network. The Veritasium video will definitely help to hold them accountable to that task.

However, for savvy social media marketers who understand how to use Facebook’s robust advertising platform, there are ways to use targeting to reduce the risk of attracting fake Likes, if not eliminate it completely. 

Let’s start with ad targeting.  To sidestep possible fraudulent Likes, brands can use three of Facebook’s more sophisticated capabilities: Custom Audiences, Partner Categories and Action Spec targeting.

Custom Audiences lets marketers target (or exclude) specific users on Facebook using a unique identifier which can consist of either an email address, phone number, Facebook UID, Mobile UID, or Apple IDFA.  By using customer and prospect data to define your targeting, you can be sure that your Facebook Like ads are being displayed to authentic users, and those that are most likely to engage with you. More about Custom Audiences here.

Partner Categories uses 3rd party consumer data from Datalogix, Axciom and Epsilon to create targeted segments based on past behaviour. For instance, in the Virtual Cat example used by Derek Muller in the video, he could have used the Pet Care Buyers > Cat Food and Products, a segment that consists of approximately 12,553,500 targeted users, to find real pet owners based on their past purchasing behaviour. Note that currently, Partner Categories are only available to advertisers in the US. More about Partner Categories here.

Action Spec Targeting allows brands that have deployed a Facebook App, such as Login with Facebook, or the Facebook Like Button, to target ads at users that have interacted with that application.  This targeting can be extremely precise and allow brands to target users based on specific actions (i.e. Liked, Commented, Voted, etc.) and objects (i.e. Likedon ).  Action Spec targeting gives brands the ability to target highly qualified audiences with extremely relevant messaging and offers, resulting in high engagement. More on Action Spec targeting here.

Using the tactics that I’ve outlined above, advertisers may find that their cost is relatively higher than the ~$0.10/Like cited by Muller in his video, which stands to reason.  As ad targeting narrows, typically costs increase.  At the end of the day, brands are hungry for the attention of their customers and prospects, and increasingly, those consumers are spending their time on Facebook (overwhelmingly so when compared to other social networks).  Paying a premium for the attention that Facebook owns is simply a reality that advertisers neeed to decide if they are willing to accept or not.

The other systemic “problem” with Facebook’s ecosystem that Muller describes is that Facebook limits organic reach to Fans as a function of its newsfeed algorithm that displays Page content only to the fans that are most likely to engage with it. This is well covered by Search Engine Watch here.  If brands want to reach 100% of their Fans on Facebook, they will need to promote their Page posts via ads.  As Muller correctly describes, Fans that don’t engage with a Page's content hurt organic Page reach by diluting engagement rates.  This has been much discussed already, but the simple rule of thumb here is to focus on generating Fans that are most likely to engage with (and share) your Page’s content. Savvy Facebook marketers know this.

Fan acquisition campaigns need to include a smart content marketing plan to generate near-immediate engagement from new Fans in order to have the best shot at ongoing organic access (or reach) to that Fan's newsfeed.  This part of the media plan is often overlooked, but is crucial to making the most out of Facebook ad budgets and protecting the integrity of your Facebook Page and its ability to generate owned media reach.  For the purpose of this post, I won’t get into the many approaches to how this can be accomplished, but if you are spending dollars on generating new Likes on Facebook and are not also thinking about how to get as many of those new Fans to engage and share your Page’s content (and quickly), then you may want to take a step back and rethink the value of your Facebook ad spend.

How do you ensure that your Page Likes are made up of authentic customers and prospects on Facebook?

Source: Kiwinz on Flickr

#3Things in Digital Marketing News - 08/06/13

In an attempt to revive my sadly neglected blog, I'll be using this platform to share three timely tidbits, or #3Things,  from my online travels that piqued my interest in relation to digital marketing, social media, technology and innovation.  Enjoy!

1. Kickstarter Launches in Canada (from Mashable)

I've always loved Kickstarter as a stellar example of how crowdsourcing and social media have been used to totally disrupt the venture capital space.  Some amazing ideas have been brought to market and have thrived as a result of the reach and Kickstarter's platform, and hopefully this will give Canadian start-ups a new tool to launch their products and services in Canada and worldwide.

2. Facebook to stop supporting Adobe Flash in desktop News Feed ad campaigns (from Inside Facebook)

We know Facebook is mobile-first, and that they are trying to simplify their Ads offering, and this latest move supports both of those strategies. (It also makes me wonder if this move is in preparation for a bigger announcement about rumored video ads on Facebook).

3. Digital Marketers on Twitter: What They Share, Whom They Retweet (from MarketingProfs)

Pretty self explanatory.  Loved this research from Leadtail and NetBase as another datapoint for identifying the top online influencers in the digital marketing world. Congrats to Jeremiah Owyang for being the 2nd most commonly retweeted person, second only to Barack Obama. That's quite an accomplishment!

What news bites made your #3Things today?

Measuring Social Media Success? Fail.

Christina Warren over at Mashable posted an interesting piece citing a recent survey that appeared on eMarketer.

The good news: 86% of companies surveyed are employing social media in their marketing practices.

The bad news: Of these companies, 84% are not measuring the success (or failure) of their efforts.

When I read this, I almost fell off my chair.

Image courtesy of Andy Ramdin via Filckr

I would assume that there would be a higher level of scrutiny on marketing dollars that are spent in the social spaces -  that the C-Suite would demand some level of accountability for these budgets being allocated to a new (and in many cases,unproven) channel.

Add to that - digital marketing, by the nature of its being, is measurable, and there are lots of great ways to easily gauge the impact of your social media marketing campaigns, depending on the goal of initiative. Here are a few:

Brand Buzz / Voice of Customer:

Some social media campaigns aim to generate discussion about your brand and increase your "share of voice".  This word of mouth exposure is often referred to as earned media, and can be more valuable than bought media, as it is perceived as more credible. There are a wide array of social media monitoring tools available to measure brand mentions in the social space and determine whether the buzz is positive or negative.  If your social media campaign's goal is improve your brand profile, you'll want to check out Radian6, Sysomos,Trackur and SM2 (just to name a few).

Social Opt-Ins (Fans, Followers and Friends)  

Tracking the number of social opt-ins can be a great way to measure community-building initiatives. Remember that the key to measuring the real value of these is to focus on the quality of your community members, versus the quantity.  Are your Fans relevant to your brand and vice-versa?  Are they active participants in the online community, posting content and recommending your products to their networks? How large is their social graph, and how influential are they within it?

Link Building

If the goal of your campaign is to generate links to your website, this can easily be measured with Google Webmaster Tools using the "Links to your site" table.  These links are dated based on when they were crawled, so this can give you a good idea of how they correlate with a social media campaign.

Traffic Generation

When the goal of social media marketing is clickthroughs to your website, measure ROI with data from your web analytics software, such as Google Analytics.  Where is your traffic coming from and how does it behave on your site? Is there an incremental difference in the value of traffic from Facebook or a particular blog, conmpared to traffic from bought media?  Does earned traffic spend more time on your site or view more pages than bought traffic?

Sales / Conversions

If you are using goal tracking within your web analytics program, you can easily measure goals, or conversions,  according to traffic source. Another way to do this is to use unique promotional codes and landing pages to identify sales resulting from social media marketing campaigns.

Customer Service / Support Costs

Is your Facebook Page a place where you provide customer support, or better yet, where your customers support each other? Do you operate a community or forum containing product information and technical FAQ's (as in the case of Hewlett Packard's Community Wiki) ?  If so, then there is likely a way to correlate community activity with a decrease in call center volume, support tickets and/or product returns.

As is the case in any marketing initiative, the key to success is to establish clear and measurable objectives prior to developing the strategy or campaign execution.  In doing so, you'll be able to easily implement the tools needed to measure your success with at least some certainty.

Have any examples of how you have measured your social media campaigns?  I'd love to hear about them in the comments...

UPDATE: Word of Mouth Marketing Budgets Indicate That Social Media Marketing Is Here To Stay

... as if there was any question. 

Oh, you mean the question in the title of my last post, Does Social Media Impede Sales?  That was rhetorical, and the answer, in case you missed the tongue planted firmly in cheek, is, only if you're not participating.

eMarketer released some market research from PQ Media, entitledWord-of-Mouth Posts Big Gains, reporting a 26.6% increase in US word of mouth marketing expenditure in 2008, in an economy that showed media sales dropping by 3.6% for the same year.  Seems like the C-Level are finally seeing the value and return from investing in the conversation.

These numbers aren't that shocking, nor is it surprising to see that the CPG and Food and Beverage categories lead the spending.  Look for the Health Care and Pharma segment to significantly increase their social media budgets in the two years to come as social media usage become seven more mainstream and regulations ease in the face of a new communications landscape.

Does Social Media Impede Sales?

Loved this funny from Scott Adams this morning.  Dilbert is always great for some business insight shrouded in dry sarcasm.

Is your brand's absence in social media conversation about your products or services costing you sales? This cartoon reminded me of a Cone study performed late last year that indicated that 93% of Americans that participate in social media expect companies to have a social media presence, and 85% believe companies should be engaging with customers via social media. If your brand isn't present and active in social media, can you justify that absence to your customers? Simply being afraid of opening an honest line of dialogue with your customers could be costing you...

25 Words of Social Media Wisdom

Liz Strauss over at Successful Blog has created an awesome meme called The 25 Words of Social Media Wisdom Project. 

Here's my contribution:

Authenticity is the key to building trust and meaningful relationships between people and brands.  To quote Brogan, "Sell ideas. Sell relationships. Sell love." Pretty simple.

Image courtesy of Niall Crotty on Flickr