Facebook “Promoted Posts” have primarily foreign “Likes”: Why? | Hacker News Reader

Facebook “Promoted Posts” have primarily foreign “Likes”: Why?

fetzervalves.com

150 pointsjaybna57 comments

This is happening because the promoted post is for a giveaway. A lot of incoming traffic can happen when you do a giveaway because freebie/contest blogs all cross-post it, and you can get a surprising amount of traffic if the prize is juicy enough.

If you clickthrough on the actual link from the post, it's to a contest entry form. After you provide your name, email, and ZIP code, it says "Want another chance to win? Just share this post on your Facebook Wall. Use the icon above! Don't forget to 'Like' on Facebook too!"

The official rules don't specifically require US citizenship or residency (most small businesses don't bother with real rules), though it does say that the prize has to be picked up in Tennessee.

The contest form: https://crosscreek.moontoast.com/estore/embed/1744?fbId=506a...

Right on money.

And it's nothing new: this kind of freebie-chasing is flourishing since late 1990s at least.

Isn't the author saying this phenomenon is unique to Promoted Posts? I assume they've done giveaways before without the same reaction. He also says the accounts looked BOT-esque. I don't think the likes can totally be attributed to just freebie chasing. Could definitely be a factor, but Facebook has a disturbing history of click-fraud and this definitely still looks like that to me.

The author here - yes, cr4zy, it seems to be isolated to Promoted Posts. I actually put two samples in the writeup. One is a contest and the other is just a status update. Both have the same problem. Furthermore, the contest entrants basically all seemed legit. It was only the Facebook Likes that seemed to be bot-ridden. If this were just freebie-chasing then I would think the non-contest posts would not be having the same issue.

Your second post was promoted to friends of the first post, with their name and photos attached to it, saying that they like your page. So someone from Indonesia who entered the contest ended up being a conduit by which your page was promoted to lots of other Indonesians.

Unfortunately, I don't think there's a way that you can avoid promoting to them in the future. That's really annoying because you will spending a lot of your promotion $ on useless fans. You can still run regular targeted ads, though, that show up on the right side. EDIT: it can be done: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4650476

Click fraud doesn't make sense to me because there's no incentive for it. Promoted posts are priced by reach, so a click, like, comment, share, etc. don't cost anyone anymore. It simply provides free viral distribution via the ticker and newsfeed.

I disagree that the likes are "bot-ridden." I checked out 15 at random. 13 looked real, with lots of recent photos, friends, posts, and gaming app activity. One looked like it was just posting photos from movies (but with a fair number of friends ... a business profile?). The last one was freshly created (seems weird), but most of the posts and comments were posted via the mobile app (seems legit).

I was surprised that none of the 15 were locked down. Fake accounts I see in the US have the most conservative privacy settings.

These are all real users. I recently checked out a similar issue when I noticed the large number of foreign likes and comments on the wall posts of tech people with large followings.

Turns out that as Facebook got hundreds of millions of new users in the Middle East and Indonesia (4th largest country now) they didn't separate out their recommendation system and were promoting US based tech people as someone to follow.

So now whenever somebody I follow, like Mike Arrington or Shira Lazar posts something, 80% of the comments and likes and most of their new followers are from people in these countries who often have no idea what they are talking about and don't know what is going on.

It has really made Facebook messy for these folk, since you can't easily delete 100,000 followers from Saudi Arabia[1]

So anyway, this has the graph all mixed up, because now Facebook thinks that all these people are 6 degrees closer to you than they really are, since they likely follow somebody that you follow - hence why they are shown the promoted post. This all goes back to an error made in the first few weeks of pushing new subscribers.

To add to that, there is a cultural gap in the translation of 'like' in some other languages. For eg. in some areas it is considered unpolite not to click the like button, while others use it as a form of 'mark as read', or 'seen this'.

The like and comment activity just happens to also be an antire magnitude higher from the people from these nations, and they happen to now only be a degree or two away from you in the Facebook graph because of a follow promotion error.

[1] They are also ridiculously friendly, I am sure I am not the only person who has received a message about 'want to make friends' from somebody at a Gulf or Saudi university.

> To add to that, there is a cultural gap in the translation of 'like' in some other languages. For eg. in some areas it is considered unpolite not to click the like button, while others use it as a form of 'mark as read', or 'seen this'.

I have a Facebook "Friend" from Japan who "Likes" literally every single activity I've made. Even if there's no way she understands it (since she doesn't understand English, and definitely not Swedish)

> they likely follow somebody that you follow - hence why they are shown the promoted post.

I always thought Promoted Posts are only promoted to people who have already "liked" your page.

Are you saying that if I follow Mike Arrington, and person X also follows Arrington, then if I promote one of my posts, Facebook will show it to person X merely because we both follow Arrington even though there is no connection at all between me and X?

That sounds like a scam.

Facebook gives you the option when promoting a post. (A) Just show to people who like you? (B) Also show to their friends.

This is ridiculous. Target the promotion to US-only.

Now, if your page is liked by folks in foreign countries then you still may get (organic!) foreign likes, but you shouldn't be getting any paid foreign likes.

tldr: layer on US-only targeting

THIS. Click-through-rates, likes, and shares are going to vary dramatically from country to country. If you're running your ad to everyone in the world, the clicks will be SO much cheaper and you'll get served in countries where clicks are cheap and click-through-rates are high.

Absolutely does not work on Facebook. Or, I can't figure it out.

Every time I run Facebook ads I target them to Raleigh, NC, USA only. Almost all the resulting clicks are foreign (according to the IPs I see in my analytics).

YMMV

Can you do US only targeting for Promoted posts?

Yes. I have a page with nearly 140k fans, and this is what I see if I choose US residents only: http://i.imgur.com/khYDf.png

You can't target only people in the US for promoted posts. The only options are to promote to Facebook fans or to promote to Facebook fans and friends of fans. Many of those friends of fans have ended up coming from foreign countries in my experience for a local restaurant.

That's not true. The target icon lets you target page posts, and the promotion will inherit the targeting of the page post.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/khYDf.png

I'm a page owner (130k+ fans).

Weird. I don't have that option on a page with 1,500 fans.

These are bots. Too many comments here trying to justify that they are not - too many vested interests on HN.

I spoke to an SEO guy 2+ years ago who was building them. He didn't know why at the time, but he knew having 1000s of identities with social graphs, a posting history etc. would have some value at some point.

He was already using a mix of full automation and Turk - and thinking about what a natural activity pattern would like and how you could randomise it without creating a pattern yourself.

Ultimately the sites that are letting this happen will be worse off for not doing all they can to stop it. Unfortunately most of these companies are measured by metrics that encourage it.

My assumption is these bot accounts are used for selling Likes/Follows on Facebook, and they Like everything in sight so that the paid Likes blend in.

That said, its unbelievably frustrating if you are trying to run Facebook ads. Nothing against foreigners, but I have to pay for every Like/click, and I'm sure they don't want to buy the local service I'm selling (and are clearly not reading the ad).

Its the ad exchange's job to curtail this sort of thing, and Facebook does a very poor job of it compared to e.g., Google. I hope they get it under control.

> My assumption is these bot accounts are used for selling Likes/Follows on Facebook, and they Like everything in sight so that the paid Likes blend in.

New Turing test: your only means of communication with the testees is that you can make Facebook postings and see which ones they like.

In theory, Facebook's (and Google AdWords') auction model protects you against this. In theory, you're tracking conversions/effectiveness, and if the number of bots that click your ad double, that means the ads are worth half, so you adjust your bid accordingly.

That's the theory at least. Reality is probably different.

Here's a plausible explanation for what is happening:

For any given user on facebook, there is a limited amount of promoted posts that facebook will show in their feed at any given time/day so that their feeds don't become overwhelmed with promoted/sponsored content.

So like other ad platforms, i.e. auction based, you are competing for that limited space with other brands and pages that are promoting/sponsoring content. If everyone is competing for the high value fans, i.e. us based fans, it would be easy to get "bid out" by putting in to low of an amount.

But since no one is likely targeting India/Indonesia/Philippines, those are cheap. And if your fans there are all that are available to you because of bid optimization constraints, facebook will most likely end up sending a disproportionate amount of your views to those fans.

Now for some sample math: If you have, let's say 5 friends in Indonesia, let's see how that could play out. Indonesia and Phillipines facebook users generally have more fb friends on avg then the rest of the world. Call it 170. So your potential audience of 'friends of fans' in indonesia is = 850.

Since not many, if any brands, are attempting to target those 850 people, you could saturate them with your promoted/sponsored content. Users in that part of the world also 'like' stuff more frequently and at a higher volume. No let's say that you get 15 likes from those 850 'friends of fans'. That like action will create an organic story in those peoples' friends newsfeeds. So 15 people, with avg of 170 friends each, like that sponsored post and an organic feed story is seen on avg by about 14% of any users friends you could reach 357 more organic impressions.

That cycle can continue on and on.

As a related data point, I had a post go viral today on Google+ (~500 +1s, 100 shares) [1] and after about an hour, the most inane comments started piling on.

"hello"

"hi friendz"

"hi"

"Every one how is the day?"

"What's the topic for today, can any one tell me? Please!" etc etc

I can explain the timing. It presumably hit "What's Hot" so they all saw it. But like OP, I don't know what to make of it. Maybe one of the OP's theories, maybe all of them.

1. https://plus.google.com/106413090159067280619/posts/ZFTKZQfj...

These comments doesn't make sense for spam (unless their account links to a lot of spam?) I wonder if it's non-english speakers trying to practice their english.

Without squinting too closely, I think it's this one. I get these on Livejournal and have seen them around the 'net. There's generic content that may apply to any possible post, and then the incentive is the PageRank that flows back from the username link. An improvement even would be to have a bot generate text based on the post, and then have paid humans deal with the captchas. </evilhat>

I thought username links were nofollow?

hhmmm ... not sure, seems they are really bad in English (e.g. "JuuuuubtghyAujkykkik"). Some are obvious spam or I guess she just want's to meet guys:

"meet me at fb gyz... ankit050@yahoo.com"

;)

A bit off-topic but Ankit is a boy's name in India. And yes, that's how many communicate, often using teenage girl lingo.

Isn't it obvious? They're responding to the Hello World.

Yes, I think you're right. Still inane but that explains most of the comments I listed here.

No, there are way too many of those weird comments for that. Someone is DoS'ing G+ comment threads, methinks.

"Ok yolo"

We had a similar problem with Chinese and Spanish comments via paid promotions for spencersmarket.com. I speak Spanish and my cofounder speaks Mandarin, these comments were not legitimate. Clearly there is some form of inauthenticity taking place with Facebook's paid promotions. My solution had been to use the language targeting tools to only expose the post only to an English (US) audience.

You can see the same sketchy metrics in Facebook ads even when drilling down to specific regions. It makes Facebook's platform questionable in regards to any promotions or advertising.

At this point you might as well just run your ads directly via mechanical turk.

"Sorry, but there is no way a ton of people from Indonesia, Saudia Arabia, etc. have suddenly and amazingly become interested in a southern women’s blog (stylish as it may be). Besides, the Likes appear only on promoted posts."

Among the Asian nouveau riche and middle class fashion is a big deal. How do I know? Facebook friends.

The rest of his comments and conclusions might be accurate, but that bit sounds ignorant. Asian region/language-specific web communities are among the biggest in the world, and this includes fashion related groups.

As the author, I meant no disrespect (and I often come across as ignorant through no fault but mine). My point was that the Promoted Posts draw a disproportionate amount of foreign traffic and only involving Likes.

Meh, I get annoyed when people try to make something seem racist that isn't. Is it so hard to believe that Asians would be interested in a style blog? No, that isn't the point. Is it hard to believe that a promoted post for an English language blog which isn't specific to Asian culture would be overwhelmingly clicked by people from Asian countries? Yes, it seems odd. That isn't really saying anything about Asian people - it is saying something about Facebook's advertising platform.

Either Asian people really love clicking on ads, something about their blog caught fire in several Asian countries, or else there is click fraud going on. The most obvious answer is the latter.

I get annoyed when people imply that I am trying to make something seem racist when I'm not. Just saying you'd be surprised about the massive interest for (Western) culture and style in certain parts of Asia.

Perhaps of interest: BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones' investgiation into fake likes from earlier this year:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18813237

Also recall the company that estimated that 80% of its clicks are coming from bots (based on disabled Javascript).

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of-its-fa...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4312731

(The original link from the HN submission is unfortunately gone)

I found roughly the same thing comparing apache logs with google analytics.

A direct conspiracy would be a pretty bad business model, but fake friend and spam disseminating accounts may be less likely to be canceled if bots or minions keep them active with bogus activity.

If ~80% of profits is really from bots, then it's hard for fb not to turn a blind eye to these accounts.

You can buy likes on eBay for about $10/thousand. I'm guessing that the sort of people who sell that service pick random pages to do before/after screenshots with datestamps etc. Sure, screenshots could be faked, but it's probably cheaper in terms of time spent to just do it for real and treat it as an overhead expense for your clickfarm.

Come on, where can you get 1000 likes for $10?

I don't check the prices frequentyl, but here's 1000 for $20: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1000-Facebook-Likes-to-your-WebSite-...

I've seen better deals than this within the last month. I don't use this sort of service BTW, I just did some research into it because I like electronic dance music and I've heard that audience-renting is rampant right now; it's easier to just buy your way into the charts than market a tune/perfmormer organically.

Black hat world, fiverr, although the price is a little higher than 10000/$10 if you want US.

Not an endorsement, just info for those who are curious and a warning that numbers aren't necessarily real.

I would err on the side of conspiracy and say that someone is being compensated for hitting the "like" button. Maybe not on your promoted post, but somewhere on Facebook. So others see easy money and click. What's the worst that can happen? They don't get paid.

My personal hypothesis after seeing a lot of this sort of behavior on advertised pages of mine is that a small but significant portion of Facebook is trained to just click "Like" indiscriminately (or at least, at the barest hint of something worthwhile).

Not sure I understand enough about the Facebook market to understand the cost/benefit of likes.

I get that Facebook charges for a 'promoted post', is there additional revenue capture on a 'like' ? I wonder if someone who is familiar with this could give us a run down of where any money flows (both source and destination) for a transaction like this. The only one I can see from the post is a one time purchase for 'promotion' from the vendor to Facebook.

We've seen the same problem with some of our promoted posts and we get a lot of foreign language comments on our posts that sound really spammy.

One clue is we usually get a message from someone who say's "we sent 5 likes to your post, please like our page back" or something to that effect. I'm guessing these are "like" harvesters who hope that spamming other people's posts with likes, they will in return get some likes back to their client's posts.

Did you try contacting some of these people and just asking them why they liked the ad? The botnet hypothesis is just that. As is the sleazy fraud theory.

"(about 90% of the time a company in Boca Raton, Florida is involved but that is a longer story)."

This just makes me smile. I finished my degree at FAU in Boca, but was so busy working to pay my way, I missed the seamy underbelly of the town. A few years back, my brother was there for business and got sucked into a Pump and dump scheme with one of his "wealthy" friends.

i'm an engineer working on promoted posts (same guys as https://www.facebook.com/georgehtakei/posts/475040805858711)

I offered up a response here: http://philztheengineernotthecoffee.tumblr.com/post/33650957...

searchgss and mschaecher pretty much nailed it in their comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4650787 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649243

Oddly enough Im only getting suggested friends and friend requests exclusively from Indonesian. I have no idea why, Ive never been to indonesian, and I know no indonesians. Something with Facebooks suggestion processes are seriously broken I think.

For promoted posts these post generally only show for people that have liked and their friends. So it could depend a lot on where the page likes are from, specifically if some are from Facebook ads then the problem may have started back there.

It's a question I've been faced with in the past, and just now I was expecting the smart crowd at HN to reach a consensus on why. It's interesting to see the sheer diversity of opinions. I guess it's not an easy question after all.

Like Spam. Not really surprising. Undoubtedly someone is making money off of this. Definitely Facebook, at least for now.

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