Facebook advertising has become one of the most popular
ways of announcing and promoting new products, with most
companies to consider it an integral part of their strategy in
marketing.
Facebook in turn approves these practices by giving it
opportunity for users to like their pages
are interested and then be informed about their progress
products.
Facebook targeting users according to their characteristics,
suggests pages that it thinks are best suited for them and for her
the service is paid handsomely by the companies that use it as
means of promotion.
However, there is also another way of promoting through Facebook which
has started to evolve in recent years and is about likes on
payment.
This is achieved through "like farms", a service they sell
various sites to interested parties and promises a specific
number of likes on their page.
As little was known about how these farms work, The
Emiliano de Cristofaro from UCL University of London and the
his collaborators decided to make the first systematic effort to
to understand how they work and if it was about
human users or for bots as the programs are called
computer that perform automatic functions on the Internet.
The method they followed was to construct thirteen pages in the
Facebook with the general description "Virtual Electricity" but without
no content beyond the prompt “This is not a real page,
please don't like her".
Two practices followed: for five of the pages
they used the ads through Facebook (Ads at the price of 5
euros per day) to generate visits to these pages.
Each campaign was defined for separate geographical areas: the USA,
France, India, Egypt and one for the whole world. For the
remaining eight pages were hired services from the most well-known
like farms circulating on the internet. The farms cost the
researchers from 55 to 150 euro, and guaranteed 1.000 likes the next ones 15
days.
The results are highly indicative, as they describe in the research
the scientists: the first method yielded 32 likes from USA, 44
from France, from 500 for India and Egypt and also 500 for
the global advertising campaign, most of which from the
India.
Likers averaged more than 300
friends something that also agrees with the global average, but it was
prominent "likers" having between 600 and 1000 likes in respective
pages, when the average for a user is 40.
The findings from the like farms are even more curious as while
in the advertising campaign via Facebook the likes were evenly distributed with
the time, farms produced likes en masse.
One of the farms for example gave 700 likes the first four
hours and then no more, which means it is against
most likely for automated profiles (bots) who act blindly
like. The supposed users even have one in their account
very large number of likes of the order of 1200-1800.
The researchers argue that these results make it clear that
fact that most of the likes are fake and not
they correspond to real people.
They also point to the fact that although Facebook would be in
position to thwart these tactics, doesn't seem to want to
does.
However, they conclude that this does not mean that one is not efficient
advertising campaign in said medium, but they should be taken
take into account these parameters in the evaluation of its performance.
SOURCE: naftemporiki.gr