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Links to low quality blogspam threatened the quality of Google's results. Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers

Links to low quality blogspam threatened the quality of Google's results. Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? If not, why do anything, esp. if addressing it kills their scary/differentiating "people in the world with Facebook accounts" metric.

anon1385 11y ago
>Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? The argument presented in the article is that they do: >These fake likes weren’t just an empty number. Whenever Second Floor Music posted content, Facebook’s algorithms placed it on the newsfeeds of a small, random sample of fans—the people who had liked Second Floor Music—and measured how many “engaged” with the content. High levels of engagement meant that the content was deemed interesting and redistributed to more fans for free—the main goal of most businesses that use social media is to reach this tipping point where content spreads virally. But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. The social media boost Bronstein had paid for never happened. Even worse, she now had thousands of fake fans who made it nearly impossible to reach her real fans. Bronstein struggled to get help from Facebook, reaching out repeatedly through help forums, but, in the end, she scrapped the original page and started again from scratch. Second Floor Music had effectively paid to ruin one of its flagship Facebook pages.
- glesica 11y ago
  > But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. Sounds like a business opportunity. Fake fans who actually engage with content. They could even post fake comments and falsely claim they are planning to attend events. What a wonderful future we've built for ourselves.
- msabalau 11y ago
  The harm is coming from Second Floor Music chasing the wrong metric: advertising to get followers as if having more likes was valuable in and of itself. Over the long term, Facebook advertising is only useful if it builds a brand or prompts a direct response. Facebook may opportunistically make money in the short term by taking money from people looking to push up a vanity metric, but presumably they aren't addressing the fake follower problem because paying for followers isn't a sustainable business, or core to how they'll make money over the long run.
  - bronzetini 11y ago
    Hi Msabalau -- Building a Facebook page is an important part of building our brand and engaging with users to nurture leads -- not only to convert in the short-term, but to build long lasting relationships. It's especially important for us because our products are simple digital downloads that go for as little as $1.50 each, so we need lifelong customers. We did not buy likes and I am not concerned with how many people like our page. I'm concerned with our engagement rate and reach -- which is (now) phenomenal. In the campaigns I have administered (after the incident that the article reported), I've created carefully targeted campaigns with high-quality copy. The New Republic article, however, discusses our first campaign, which was unfortunately low-quality and poorly targeted. Instead of learning that we hadn't created a good ad by seeing bad engagement, we learned by having our page overrun with fake likes who could not be removed. That's not a typical response for an ad buy, which is a real problem with Facebook's system. Thanks for reading the story! Rachel Bronstein, Web Editor, Second Floor Music

anon1385 11y ago

>Do inflated "likes" for brands or celebrities harm the core value prop for consumers or Facebook's business model with advertisers? The argument presented in the article is that they do: >These fake likes weren’t just an empty number. Whenever Second Floor Music posted content, Facebook’s algorithms placed it on the newsfeeds of a small, random sample of fans—the people who had liked Second Floor Music—and measured how many “engaged” with the content. High levels of engagement meant that the content was deemed interesting and redistributed to more fans for free—the main goal of most businesses that use social media is to reach this tipping point where content spreads virally. But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. The social media boost Bronstein had paid for never happened. Even worse, she now had thousands of fake fans who made it nearly impossible to reach her real fans. Bronstein struggled to get help from Facebook, reaching out repeatedly through help forums, but, in the end, she scrapped the original page and started again from scratch. Second Floor Music had effectively paid to ruin one of its flagship Facebook pages.

glesica 11y ago
> But the fake fans never engaged, depressing each post’s score and leaving it dead on arrival. Sounds like a business opportunity. Fake fans who actually engage with content. They could even post fake comments and falsely claim they are planning to attend events. What a wonderful future we've built for ourselves.
msabalau 11y ago
The harm is coming from Second Floor Music chasing the wrong metric: advertising to get followers as if having more likes was valuable in and of itself. Over the long term, Facebook advertising is only useful if it builds a brand or prompts a direct response. Facebook may opportunistically make money in the short term by taking money from people looking to push up a vanity metric, but presumably they aren't addressing the fake follower problem because paying for followers isn't a sustainable business, or core to how they'll make money over the long run.
- bronzetini 11y ago
  Hi Msabalau -- Building a Facebook page is an important part of building our brand and engaging with users to nurture leads -- not only to convert in the short-term, but to build long lasting relationships. It's especially important for us because our products are simple digital downloads that go for as little as $1.50 each, so we need lifelong customers. We did not buy likes and I am not concerned with how many people like our page. I'm concerned with our engagement rate and reach -- which is (now) phenomenal. In the campaigns I have administered (after the incident that the article reported), I've created carefully targeted campaigns with high-quality copy. The New Republic article, however, discusses our first campaign, which was unfortunately low-quality and poorly targeted. Instead of learning that we hadn't created a good ad by seeing bad engagement, we learned by having our page overrun with fake likes who could not be removed. That's not a typical response for an ad buy, which is a real problem with Facebook's system. Thanks for reading the story! Rachel Bronstein, Web Editor, Second Floor Music