A few days ago, a video blogger from the science education channel Veritasium posted a video on YouTube that claimed Facebook was taking money from advertisers and giving them “fake likes” for their pages instead of real users with credible engagement. The YouTuber conducted an experiement with a few dummy pages he set up and paid Facebook money to get Likes for. However, his pages mostly received Likes from users in developing countries, with less than credible profile pages, and it got little to no engagement.
A spokesperson from Facebook responded to the video with this statement:
Fake likes don’t help us. For the last two years, we have focused on proving that our ads drive business results and we have even updated our ads to focus more on driving business objectives. Those kinds of real-world results would not be possible with fake likes. In addition, we are continually improving the systems we have to monitor and remove fake likes from our platform.
It’s worth noting that much of the original experiment referenced to in the video was two years ago and Facebook has taken great pains to weed out fake profiles and users who are obviously working for click-farms. But if nothing else, the video highlights just how difficult it is to get organic engagement for your Facebook page if you are a brand. Even legitimate ads attract click-farms who will click on anything to cover their trail, which leads to your page getting filled with users who provide no value and no engagement.
