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"Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “not
by m12k 11y ago
"Facebook says it uses pattern recognition to find and eliminate click farms and accounts that exist solely to like pages. Since March, says Facebook, it’s “notified 200,000 Pages that we’ve protected their accounts from fake likes.” I love the way they put this: “Protected,” as if the companies hadn’t paid for them."
This may be more accurate than the author of this article believes. I've read elsewhere that precisely because FB is using pattern recognition to combat this, the cleverest of the fake accounts spend a certain amount of their time doing random/normal stuff to avoid detection. And this includes liking random businesses. And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts (so it is shown to a bigger percentage of their followers), then the more fake followers they have, the more real money they are wasting to advertise to bots. So if a business is actually using FB to engage with their userbase, then the fake likes are in fact detrimental to them.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoGreat points > And one of the problems is that if a legitimate business pays FB to promote one of their posts The same applies to non-paid content. Facebook will only expose your content to a portion of your users, obviously the more fake users you have the fewer real people you'll reach. Engagement levels have shown to decrease when adding fake users in previous experiments.
- stingraycharles 11y agoI would like to add that if they would punish the businesses, this could of course be abused: if I have to pay $50 to have my competitor have serious spam issues with Facebook, possibly resulting in a penalty, that is some serious damage I could do.
- corin_ 11y agoNot just a problem if you spend money promoting to unwanted fake likes - EdgeRank decides who sees your un-promoted content based in part upon your average engagement levels, if half of your fans never engage because they are fake then your stats look worse to Facebook and so your content will be seen by a lower proportion of your real fans, even before you start spending $ promoting stuff.
- sokoloff 11y agoPresumably, the snowshoe fake likes are somewhat even distributed, so there's no reason to think legitimate business A would be preferentially punished by fake like low engagement versus legitimate business B, right?
- nitrogen 11y agoFake likes may be randomly distributed, but real likes are not, so evenly distributed fake likes will be more detrimental to businesses with fewer real likes.
- florianletsch 11y agoVeritaseum did a nice analysis and summary of this exact situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
- josefresco 11y ago"Protected" might be more accurate than you think initially. One of the first things that happens when blackhat SEO experts discover a "penalty" mechanism, is they will attempt to invoke it upon their competition. Google deals with this re:bad links. Once they started penalizing, it became a new tactic to suppress competition.
- wlesieutre 11y agoAnd if they don't penalize for it, then it's a 0-risk proposition to try buying thousands of links just in case a few of them sneak by and boost your rank. What do you have to lose? But like you said, Google doesn't know who paid for them, so if they penalize spam links you can use that against competitors. There's no good solution other than "Be 100% perfect at identifying and ignoring fake links."
- josefresco 11y agoGoogles doesn't really say, and I believe they are caught in a tough spot - unable to create an enforceable rule. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en I actually think one of the things that stops competitors from buying poor quality links, is the fear that it might have the opposite effect. Google simply can't keep up with the spam that is created - so they are forced to take a moderate approach.
- GFischer 11y agoWe did a Facebook page for an university project, and created a small campaign for it (we were trying to do landing-page style validation). It got a lot of "likes" which looked a lot like fake accounts trying to look less suspicious, and none of them converted to the landing page, they were just clicking "like".
- rebootthesystem 11y agoFacebook is a mess and, to some extent, a huge scam. I spent tens of thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook to build-up an audience for a page for a business we were spinning up. We used very narrow criteria to guide the advertising and, over time, got tons of likes to our page. And then it happened. FB changed the percentage of people you can reach with posts to your own page. In some cases you are lucky to get 1%. Of course, they also added the ability to reach them through advertising. Which is a travesty. I paid plenty to get them to my page in the first place and now FB wants me to pay again and again every single time I want to say something to them. Fuck them. I know of lots of people who spent a lot more than I ever have on FB who have abandoned the platform for marketing. One guy was doing a million dollars a month with them. Gone. He brought-up exactly the same issue I describe above. So, yeah, again, fuck them. Thankfully there are other ways to reach people on the 'net.