Wow, I can get a lot of Facebook likes quickly!
-
I did some testing with Facebook ads and resulting Facebook likes on target pages. And something is wrong!
Just after creating the ad, before the ad was approved, I could get many likes on the target page without even seeing any traffic on server logs or google analytics.
I documented my tests here. I repeated the tests 6 times, every time I could get tens of likes on the target page within seconds and without any approval of the ad.
These pages have little traffic and there's no way these likes could have been natural!
Everyone I reported was able to reproduce it, try yourself.
A little update. I found others reporting un-expected Likes pouring...
But at least they were "running" the ad, so externals to Facebook could have seen it and decided to Like it to later offer "liking" service as reported from this fellow.
But in my case the ad was not approved... So... Who can see it beside me and Facebook?
-
Max -
Yes, this was for a non-profit, religious organization to promote an important holiday event that was $36 in price. I can't share the conversion data, but it reached a significantly new audience in a 25 mile area around the city, with lots of conversions, a ton of impressions. Honestly I didn't even pay attention to the Facebook likes, as it didn't really matter to this campaign. I'd be happy to discuss more offline, though, if you want to message me.
Thanks!
- Jeff
-
I am very curious to know what you will find out, Jeff. Let me know when you have the results.
If I may ask, when you said your recent campaign was very successful, by which metrics? Can you share some details?
I am really hungry for FB campaign data, wish people was sharing info on FB campaigns more.
-
Yes, that is indeed strange.
I just ran a very successful campaign on Facebook recently, and it did garner more likes. Although that wasn't the intention of the ad, and I didn't do any testing during the pre-approval campaign to track likes.
I think it's people like you, who measure and track everything, that help unravel some of the mystery behind some of these new systems that are fairly opaque to the outside world. So well done...
I have an upcoming Facebook campaign that I'm poised to run soon, and will do some additional tracking and measurement on this issue.
Thanks!
- Jeff
-
So far the likes are still there.
If it was some sort of ad testing, why liking the url more than once, or twice... If it's just a test? Why 60 times?
Furthermore, with your question you are opening a door into another mystery. In the past weeks I tested likes campaigns for fan pages. And what I noticed is that once I stop the campaign not only the likes rate per day decrease, but the balance between likes and unlikes in the following days and weeks stay flat, in other words the total amount of likes stay the same. Which sounds odd for few reasons, 1) who goes back to unlike something? I actually never did, 2) how could likes and unlikes balance each other regularly, week after week?
It sounds suspicious.
Especially when you consider FB removed the possibility to list users who liked something from graph api and fql.
All people reporting FB likes fraud in the past were looking at profile of users liking their page or url and finding strange things. And FB remove that.
I keep thinking it smell badly.
-
Max - That's indeed interesting. Quick question, though... did the Facebook "Likes" stay on the sites, or did this number decrease?
I wonder if part of Facebook's automated testing procedure is to crawl the site with their internal systems, and make sure that the page mentioned in the advertisement works properly, in order to combat fraud / phishing / cross-liking?
Most of the research out there has more to do with combatting fake "Likes" that people buy from companies, and how this can affect a business:
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2329878/Facebook-Ad-Fraud-How-Can-Advertisers-Combat-Paid-Likes
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why isn't my Facebook page showing up in search results?
When I search directly for imageworks creative facebook page on Google, I get many results - some of which are not mine and some of which are listings from other citation sites like Manta. I did a site: search and I do see that the page is indexed by Google, but it's pretty important that we get a better ranking than we currently have! This is the Facebook url: https://www.facebook.com/ImageWorksCreative As part of our rebranding, we did have the URL changed from /imageworksstudio, but that was well over a month ago. I feel as though Google should have caught up by now. Any thoughts on how we can get our FB profile onto the front page?
Social Media | | ScottImageWorks0 -
Which FREE tools do you use for Facebook Page analysis?
Hello. Could you tell me, which free tools do you use for analysing Facebook Pages? It should connect with FB Insights. (no just information from "outside") thanks a lot 🙂
Social Media | | mysho0 -
Best option for Facebook Page/Usernames?
Hey guys My first post here! currently trialling seomoz and impressed so far 🙂 My question relates to a choice of Facebook page/username for a client whose preference is to refer to their online business name by the domain name, where this business name includes his two most important keywords. So as an example: firstsecondthird.co.uk Now in terms of seo that's fine as search engines factor in keywords in the domain name, and even referring to domain name in website copy does not seem to pose too many issues. However on Facebook I've noticed that if we go with page name of: FirstSecondThird (obsiously we can't add .co.uk - I've used camel case for readability) then when using the facebook search the page does NOT get listed for any of the keywords as it appears it only matches on whole strings. So I'm going to recommend that he changes Faceook page name to First Second Third (with spaces) even though client does not really like this option. Do you guys think that makes sense? Also if I do make that change should I also go with fixed Username of First-Second-Third i.e. with hyphens or stick with one long string i.e. FirstSecondThird, which matches the domain name? Any advice appreciated. PS hope this is under right topic- several others seemed applicable Thanks
Social Media | | redactuk0 -
How to get most out of viral blog traffic?
Our website has a WordPress blog, hosted at website.com/blog. I've discovered that with some hard work and a bit of luck, I can create a blog posts that will go viral - they will get about 50k readers in 1-3 days (which is a LOT for our website), and 300-1000 tweets, 100-250 Facebook shares, and anywhere from 10 to 130~ G+1s. (Unfortunately, these are for the posts, not for our website.) The posts will also get some comments. And most importantly, a few links - sometimes from very reputable domains. However, I feel that I could be doing much more here. The links go directly to the blog post, and I'm not sure how much is that helping our website overall in regards to SEO. What actions can I encourage the readers to do, and how should I prioritize them? Some of the actions are: Sharing/liking, writing a comment, checking out our products, subscribing to our Facebook/Twitter/G+ profile, subscribing to our RSS. One another possible action/opportunity that I see and which could potentially pay off is to offer some kind of PDF report to be emailed, which would initiate an autoresponder sequence. Do you think that having a clear call to action in a blog post could reduce the sharing of it ? Is it possible to encourage whoever is writing about our blog posts to use a direct link to our website, instead of linking directly to the post? If yes, how? E.g. if I included a direct link to our website in the post itself, e.g. in the most important part of the post that gets quoted, it could work - unfortunately that's usually virtually impossible. Am I sitting on a gold mine here, and should do this as much as possible? Should I consider putting this content not just onto the blog, but on our website.com/something ? I'm actually not sure how that would help though, it would simply have a shorter URL. I've discovered that it doesn't matter where I post this content, if the presentation looks decent. So it doesn't have to be posted on website.com/blog. I can even post it on other domains - should I? And the most important question: How do I get the most out of this opportunity in SEO regards? Thanks for any ideas or insights!
Social Media | | Jiri.Novotny0 -
Find Facebook Likes and Google +1's Across An Entire Domain?
Does anyone know a good way to find the number of Facebook Likes or Google +1's across an entire domain? It looks like SEOMoz only shows these metrics for individual pages.
Social Media | | SparkplugDigital0 -
Delete Facebook Account to Trasfer Username on My Fan Page
I have following Facebook fan page and want vistastores username which is my domain name. But, I am not able to get it due to my personal profile. Fan page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vista-Stores/160667877282170 Personal profile: http://www.facebook.com/vistastores I am thinking to delete my Facebook account. [Profile & Fan page] Then, I will re-open my Facebook account and create fan page. So, Can I transfer my username from personal profile to fan page by this method?
Social Media | | CommercePundit0 -
What can Google tell from a video?
I notice that Youtube apparently does kind of an automatic transcription. What can Google tell about a video? Is it comparing text from a voice recognition transcript? Can it take compare the waveform of a video signal and see how different a video is from another video? I'm putting together a variety of videos that are similar for different pages and wondering how much do I have to change for each video. I remember one time I attempted to launch a video that was an exact copy but with a different file name, title and tags and Youtube said, "hey, that's the same video!" Thanks!
Social Media | | 945010