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
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
-
Facebook sharing and referral links. Is there a happy medium?
We have a website with a large member base where users share content a lot. But the SEO problem I have, is that every share needs to reflect a "referral link" so that if a new user signs up, the original sharer receives "referral" credit for that sign up. I really want to be able to take advantage of our huge member base and their sharing, but I'm finding it difficult to do so because each user shares a link that has their referral in it. Can anyone think of an SEO friendly method of sharing that both gives our site SEO benefits, as well as providing the referral credit back to the user?
Social Media | | JDatSB0 -
Best Way to Build up Likes
Hello, What's the best ways to build up "Likes" on Facebook. A friend of mine wanted to buy likes and I'd like to give him an alternative. We're in the personal development training industry. We have a nice website 110 Likes No twitter or Google+ large number of past customers. The strategies have to be very non-abrasive as our fan base really cares a lot about us. In other words, it's not the kind of audience you can send mass messages to or do anything that would seem like sales or advertising. Thanks!
Social Media | | BobGW0 -
Does promoting a new page on twitter/facebook help it get indexed faster?
I know this probably won't matter much to people who get crawled on a regular basis, but for those of us who don't, does promoting a new page on social media help it get indexed faster with google? My site rarely gets crawled, but I've recently been adding new content. When I add new content I started to promote it on facebook/twitter and I do get minimal traffic from it. I noticed that a couple of the pages seem to be indexing quicker than pages normally do for me, although I'm not sure if it's because I recently migrated to WP or what..? I know T/FB are no follow sites, but is there a chance that promoting a page may contribute to the pages getting indexed? Thanks for any insight you can shed on the matter. It's more for curiosities sake than anything else. Pete S.
Social Media | | psokoloski0 -
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 -
Has anyone used facebook to promote their website
Hi i have seen lots of facebook pages that are being used to promote a company and would like to know if anyone is using facebook or any other social network such as myspace to promote their website without having to pay a fee. I would love to see some examples and learn how to set up a facebook page that is there to promote a website. What i would like to do is to have one that promotes my travel website where i can post travel stories on facebook and promote my website and also drive traffic to my website from facebook. any help would be great
Social Media | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Is there value in a presence on them?
I have a client (professional practice) whose father is a marketing professor. He is pushing the client that he should have a professional page on social sites. While I believe having FB likes, shares, Tweet links, +1, etc. on the page, I really am ambivalent about building pages specifically for social media sites.
Social Media | | RobertFisher
For some of you who have tracked the efficacy of these it would be great to know your pros and cons.0 -
Do you think Google +1 can hurt rankings?
More on established B2C sites (not blogs/forums)? For example, a client has the #1 ranking for the kw with the highest exact match volume in their vertical and sitelinks. Is it better to keep things status quo and not give Google the data or potentially introduce a new signal to Google that might be negative if CTR is not high enough?
Social Media | | MatomySEO0 -
How do you believe Google's +1 service is going to affect SEO? What can we do?
So Google just announced the +1 button, which is there answer to Facebook 'likes' button: http://searchengineland.com/meet-1-googles-answer-to-the-facebook-like-button-70569 http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/30/google-plus-one/ They should begin showing up now on Google US. If you aren't seeing them, you can turn them on here: http://www.google.com/experimental/ I want to know? What affect do you predict these are going to have? Is there anything we can do from an SEO point to begin leveraging +1 right from the outset?
Social Media | | Tom-Anthony1