Facebook advertising has become one of the most popular ways to announce and promote new products, with most companies considering it an integral part of their marketing strategy.
Facebook, in turn, applauds these practices by giving users the opportunity to like pages that interest them and then be informed about the progress of products. Facebook , targeting users according to their characteristics, suggests pages that it believes are best suited to them and for this service is paid handsomely by the companies that use it as a means of promotion.
However, there is another way of promoting on Facebook that has begun to develop in recent years and it concerns paid likes. This is achieved through "like farms", a service that various websites sell to interested parties and promises a certain number of likes on their page.
As little was known about how these farms operated, Emiliano de Cristofaro from UCL London and his colleagues decided to make the first systematic attempt to understand how they operated and whether they were human users or bots, as computer programs that perform automatic functions on the internet are called.
The method they followed was to create thirteen Facebook with the general description "Virtual Electricity" but without any content beyond the prompt "This is not a real page, please do not like it."
Then, two practices followed: for five of the pages, they used Facebook ads ( Adsat a price of 5 euros per day) to generate visits to these pages. Each campaign was set for separate geographical areas: the USA, France, India, Egypt and one for the whole world. For the remaining eight pages, services were rented from the most famous like farms on the Internet. The farms cost the researchers from 55 to 150 euros, and guaranteed 1,000 likes in the next 15 days.
The results are highly indicative, as the scientists describe in their research : the first method yielded 32 likes from the USA, 44 from France, 500 from India and Egypt and also 500 for the global advertising campaign, most of which came from India. The users who made the likes had on average more than 300 friends, which is in line with the global average, but they were prominent "Likers" having between 600 and 1000 likes on their respective pages, when the average for a user is 40.
The findings from the like farms are even more strange, as while in the Facebook advertising campaign , likes were evenly distributed over time, the farms produced likes en masse. One of the farms, for example, gave 700 likes in the first four hours and then none at all, which means that these are most likely automated profiles (bots) that blindly like. The alleged users actually have a very large number of likes in their accounts, in the order of 1200-1800.
The researchers argue that these results make it abundantly clear that most of the likes are fake and do not correspond to real people. They also point out that although Facebook would be able to prevent these tactics, it does not seem to want to do so. They conclude, however, that this does not mean that an advertising campaign on this medium is not effective, but these parameters should also be taken into account when evaluating its performance.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
