After gathering a fair bit of friends and likes organically on Facebook, the mango decided to go for Facebook advertising. The mango wasn’t sure of the right target audience, but decided to start with ladies in the age group of 24 to 30, living in India, in Pune and in Mumbai. Likes started coming in, but as Mango started to drill down on finding and analysing who is being reached, there was a startling revelation.
One of the liker was this didi.
I tried to analyse if she is the right audience by looking at her friends, posts, likes etc. Then I realised something isn’t right. There were 75 more likes that had come in my week long experiment on Facebook advertising. There was one more lady
I tried to analyse her and she also didn’t seem right. Moreover, she had liked almost 800 pages, that’s another point I will highlight in another post. Coming back, she didn’t seem the right audience. Then I did an image search on the both the lovely ladies and here I was shocked with their multiple incarnations on Facebook! Here are some!
There are 140 profiles on Facebook carrying the same photo.
The other girl’s photo also is on over 100 profiles like this below.
I also ran a check on similar images, and found there are multiple and multiple profiles carrying the same photo. Mind you, these are not celebrity pics. I stumbled upon a treasure trove of girl-next-door type pics, which are classified or tagged as Desi Facebook Girl. Pray, what does that mean! Are these girls real, or are they made up pics, where are these pics coming from, is someone making a business out of these pics, why are people setting up so many fake profiles, is something fishy goin on.
While we ponder on these questions, the real worry for the mango was among all these profiles, how to find the right one, to whom only the ad should be shown. There might well be a male handling the female profile. The ads shown to him/her while operating the fake profile still get recorded as impressions in my CPM kitty. Same for if the same person is handling multiple profiles. How to optimise the target audience and the money spent on them?
Or should you say that you want to reach out to ‘an audience’ anyway. The persons handling the fake profiles are also a part of the audience any which way. So not bother about the fake profiles.
Or should you opt to not advertise to young females as those seem to be largest concentration among fake profiles.
On the other hand, does the official figure of 83 million fake profiles as declared by Facebook seem to less, considering my exercise above?
Govind G Prajapati
This is some technic used by SMO Providers, who uses lots of fake accounts of girls to get audiences from different places, and then they get likes for their clients.
did you hired some SMO company to do this?
Devgad Mango
Govind,
No, the mango believes in learning and doing such critical things by own. I didn’t hire any company to do my FB advertising.
Saurabh Moody
I have been working with business as Growth Hacker from some time now. The fakes problem which you discussed is something similar which I asked to the businesses with whom I used to work in context to SMS campaigns.
This is what they said – From business perspective, when a business sends 10000 sms they know before hand that majority of the recipients are not the right TG. But they bet on the final results – they say if they are able to make 5 sales (rs. 5000) at the end of the day by sending 10,000 sms or spending rs. 1000 that’s what they are looking out for and happy with.
So my recommendation to ones who are opting for FB ad is – Try and focus on getting the end real world customers and tracking them back. And if all this exercise justifies the ad cost then only you should get in.
At the same time, before you get into in
While building our product – SOCIAL PROFILING SYSTEM we learnt few things on FB which can help businesses. They are:
1) When you are NEW on facebook, try and get the at least 2K-5K organic LIKES in the beginning.
2) This acts as a seed when you do FB ads. Because friends of all the organic likes gets to see you ad and if they find it relevant will like your page. This is interesting because when organic likes were real people and you have targeted only friends of people who have liked your page – then the chances of getting real people like your page gets more realistic.
3) Make 10 posts everyday so that you can reach more than 60% of your total likes. 10% x 10 times will logically give you 100% utilization of your likes and overcome FB limitation. ~60% because few like views can be common across posts.
4) If possible you should always have your own FB app, which can help you get e-mail address of all the likes / users and will help you target / contact them individually. At the same time, you have your own prospects db just accumulated from FB.
Hope this helps the community 🙂
Ravishankar Biotechnologist A K
Seems valid ideas..
Devgad Mango
Saurabh,
Those are indeed extremely valid points! Thanks for sharing!
Sridhar V
I’m not so surprised by the fake photos but the same pic used on 100+ profiles seems like a huge spam network.
There are plenty of people who have photos of actors, TV anchors, or fake pretty faces. Facebook being easy to use, responsive, powerful and viral makes people to sometimes take advantage for wrong reasons.
No harm if someone carries a photo of Salman or Katrina…..but it should not be misleading or creating spam.