The "Farming" Facebook Can't Control

Anyone who has a Facebook business page might have noticed some recent changes in the way Facebook measures its advertisement campaigns. When you have a business page, you have the option of "promoting" your page to a specific client demographic to increase the "likes" on your page. You can set a limit to how much money you want to spend per day and restrict the location to which your page is advertised.

Sounds great, right?

Well, it was a great way to advertise and get your business name out in the social media community- until the cropping up of "Like Farms." A "Like Farm" is a company in a developing county (usually Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, etc.) that pays its employees $1.00 per 1,000 likes clicked on Facebook. So, when you are approached by a marketing company that can promise X amount of "likes" to your business page in a month, please know that they are outsourcing to these "Like Farms."

Now, Facebook started cracking down on these business pages using "Like Farms" to increase their visibility; over 85,000 company pages have been deleted by Facebook so far for this action (so be warned).

In order to stay in business and become undetected by Facebook, the employees at these "Like Farms" starting "liking" everything. This way, Facebook cannot tell if it's someone who is paid to like a certain page, or if the profile just happens to "like" everything advertised on Facebook. These employees watered down the "likes" to remain undetected.

Why is this relevant if you want to advertise through Facebook?

So, let's say you set a budget per day to advertise your page through Facebook. You might get some legitimate response from people interested in your business, but based on studies conducted, about 80% of the "likes" will be from employees of the "Like Farms" in developing countries. If you own a little boutique in Tampa, FL, a "like" in Indonesia is not going to benefit your business.

More adversely still, your posts and campaigns will be negatively affected by these fakes "likes." Facebook measures post engagement very simply:

If you post something, Facebook will send it to a handful of your followers. If they interact with it, Facebook thinks, "Ah. This must be a good post." So, it sends it out to another handful of your followers, and so on. This is how Facebook measures engagement for your page. You must maintain a certain percentage of engagement for Facebook to keep your profile.

If the majority of your "likes" are from "Like Farms" that have infiltrated Facebook advertising, then they will most likely not be engaging with your post, which limits the number of followers to which Facebook will send your post. The cycle continues until your page shows no interaction and Facebook begins to question its validity.

This post has illustrated an exaggerated scenario, but one that is easily reproduced based on current statistics with Facebook advertisement. Facebook can still be used to grow your business, but it has to be done through very specific campaigns and very closely managed to prevent fraudulent "likes."

If you are interested in learning how to do this, or if you want to know how to grow your business through other means, please give me a call at (813) 629-1561 or email at info@rhetoricrefined.com. You can also visit www.rhetoricrefined.com for more information.