A recent BBC experiment has cast
doubt on the effectiveness of Facebook's advertising mechanisms. Will it be a
good idea for SMEs to invest in Facebook ads to generate interest in their
business?
BBC
conducted an experiment to test if Facebook's advertising campaigns really paid
off. They created a Facebook page for a completely fictitious company called
“VirtualBagel”, which basically does nothing at all. At the time of writing,
there were more than 3,000 'likes' for the Facebook page. The experiment was
conducted by a BBC correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, in which he spent $10 to
advertise his 'company' to various regions such as the UK, US, India, Egypt,
Indonesia and the Philippines. Though his company was based in the UK, most of
the 'likes' he got were from Egypt and Indonesia, and barely any from the US or
UK. More interestingly, when he looked into the profiles which had 'liked' his
Facebook page, Rory found that that many of them had like over 3,000 or 4,000
Facebook pages.
Many of them had names such as “Ahmed Ronaldo”, and did not
seem to be legitimate profiles. Given the statistic that around 5-6 % of all
Facebook profiles are fake, it is very concerning if they are actually 'bots'
programmed to like random Facebook pages. This would devalue the advertising of
Facebook by a great deal. It is also questionable if the ads are reaching the
intended market, as most of the likes came from countries which did not really
concern the product's location at all.
Nevertheless,
the BBC experiment is also not in anyways conclusive because of several
assumptions it makes. For example, the advertiser only ran his campaign for a
few days and has used that data set for analysis, while most companies spend
months on advertising to obtain tangible results. Also, Facebook commented that
the advertiser has taken a 'scatter-gun approach' with no real demographic
targeting, and this is also something that lowers the reliability of the study.
The BBC article does bring up a salient point though, that the Facebook
advertising algorithm will come under further scrutiny in the future, given
that the US $100 billion valuation was projected mainly on the revenue
generating capabilities of Facebook's target advertising prowess.