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JacobJans

I run profitable Facebook marketing campaigns.

Here's the problem with this guy's argument:

He expects people from Somalia to be as responsive to his content at people from the United States.

That makes exactly zero sense.

These aren't "likes", these are people. And the people from Somalia apparently don't like his content.

But, according to his very own numbers, people from the United States are very responsive.

Are fake likes the obvious answer?

Or is he completely ignoring marketing fundamentals?

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If the people didn't like his content, then why did they "like" it?

winner winner chicken dinner

Please write an article about how you run these "profitable" campaigns. Seriously. It seems like you are the only person I've ever heard make this claim and I'm sure people here are dying to know the secret.

I've run many profitable campaigns on Facebook -- by not buying likes or advertising a Facebook Page. You can advertise normal links on Facebook and that operates like any other online ad -- some text and a picture, linked to a landing page for your own site.

There's no "likes" to count or "engagement" to measure other than the normal conversion metrics -- how many of the clickthroughs completed whatever action you wanted them to complete on the landing page, how many eventually convert to paying customers, and is their LTV higher than their CPA.

Facebook's also a great channel for retargeting. I run a campaign for Improvely there and the ads only appear to people that have already hit the signup page within the past few days.

Sounds like that's the only viable way to have profitable campaigns: having ads that go directly to your landing page.

I for one am confused as to why people chose the other indirect, convoluted way: buying likes, directing people to their FB page, THEN hoping they click through to their actual website.

You can save money on a Facebook ad by linking to a Facebook page, well on a per click basis but I'm not sure if it's a good strategy overall.

Our company has seen lots of profitable campaigns run through us onto Facebook. We know this because our customers track the sales they get from the ads and it can be easily compared against the amount they spent.

I think you're misunderstanding the word "fake" in this context. He means they are inauthentic likes, aka likes from real people who don't actually like what they're clicking the Like button on.

The problem is that he's intentionally buying likes from people he KNOWS aren't responsive.

The simple solution? Stop targetting the unresponsive countries.

It's not rocket science. It's actually super-brain-dead obvious.

If you're buying likes from India -- and no Indians are responding to your content -- then why would you keep buying likes from India?

This is stuff you can spend $5 to figure out. It is very, very, very easy to stop targeting the countries that don't respond.

He claims certain countries give him a good response, and certain countries give him no response.

His solution is to stop advertising and complain about "fake likes."

Why doesn't he just stop targeting markets that don't work for him?

Maybe so he can make a link-bait youtube video?

He was buying likes only from the US and he was still getting fraudulent likes from profiles that liked thousands of pages.

It's funny how he predicted all these stock objections to his claims of fraud in the video, and yet they all appear here in the HN thread. Let's all watch the video again shall we?

You didn't watch the video...

He specially addressed that at 05:25 into the video. And he spent $20 instead of $5. He marketed to the US, CAN, AUS, and the UK and analyzed the new likes. The likes appeared to come from fake users.

I see you are a proponent of the third way.

http://xkcd.com/1285/

Thank you for being one of the few logical people in this thread. People love to bring out their pitchforks, and report / downvote (or whatever it is they do here) when someone disrupts the "flow" of things.

The guy ran a poor ad. It's his fault, not Facebooks.

As others have noted, this is explained in the video (and made to seem super-brain-dead-obvious, at that).

Specifically, clickfarmers are liking the ads whether they have been targeted or not, in order to thwart automated detection. So you can't escape it.

So far the only way around this that I've seen mentioned in this thread is to not advertise your facebook page at all, and instead advertise links to an external page that redirects back to your facebook page.

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