It is deceiving when using it as a metric to sell more ads. Yes, people may be liking stuff, but you can like thousands of things a day and not even open the facebook page, thus not seeing any ads. If they were able to break down like clicks based on whether somebody is on the site or not, that would be a more honest approach (not sure if they do this or not already) as you can see if marketing dollars spent there would be worth it. If many people are liking stuff that is related to your product/market but never go to Facebook.com to see ads, then why waste the money?
I agree completely. The "Like" phenomenon feels very much like something you would see on VH1's "Remember the 80's?" The problems arise when people who enjoy using Facebook immediately assume "PROFIT." I would challenge most people lauding this as the next Google to ask themselves how many ads they've clicked on in the past year on Facebook compared to Google.
I don't have any doubt about Facebook's smarts or ability to implement cool social networking things, but the bottom line is that very little of what they offer anybody would pay for.
There's a serious issue of integrity here - Facebook is already appropriating people's identity for use in advertising, which in itself is disconcerting. The real world equivalent to their ads where you have 'liked' a page would be something like a ski resort using your ski pass photo on a billboard next to an endorsement of their resort.
On top of that misrepresenting the opinions of its users like this to promote content that they have never even seen to their extended network is misleading in the extreme. Most people would not agree to this sort of manipulation, and there are even questions about how some likes have been generated: http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-s...
Facebook have to be careful here, as if they lose the trust of their users by continually abusing it, people will just shut down their accounts. Their actual site offers little that can't be easily done with other services, their only pull with users at present is the network effect, which works both ways as if trust starts to slip and people notice others leaving, it can easily snowball.
Remember, boys and girls: A "like" has no intrinsic value whatsoever. It is worth exactly as much as the paid conversions it eventually drives.
If Facebook reduce the exposure your posts get to interested potential customers who have voluntarily liked your page, then those likes are worth less accordingly. You should be proportionately less willing to spend money promoting on Facebook as a result.
The only reason this sort of strategy works for Facebook is because too many people don't understand the basic economic model at work here and just throw more money at the auction hoping for the best, which is a race to the bottom that drives prices up for everyone and benefits no-one but Facebook.
Of course, Facebook do just about everything they can to obscure how much money you're actually paying and what you're really getting for it. Even with paid ads, the numbers they themselves report frequently appear contradictory unless you know exactly what they mean (and sometimes even then). Never trust these numbers. The only things that matter are how much money in total you spent on Facebook in a given period, and how much money people visiting from Facebook spent with you in turn.
I feel like the author is overstating the benefits of a like button on every page. Google - and many other ad networks - also know the products being viewed if the site owner is using retargetted ads. Might facebook offer compelling retargetting? Sure. But I imagine the conversion rates would be, at best, comparable to other retargetting networks. Probably not a game changer.
Yeah, great point here. Facebook really emphasized this difference awhile back when they started allowing users to "Like" a Page, but then choose to hide it from their News Feed.
This allows me, as a Facebook user, to complete my profile and declare that I like something, even if the marketing that the associated Page is doing isn't something I want to see.
This ensures that profile information remains accurate, which is critical for ad targeting - people don't start unliking things they actually like, just to avoid annoying marketing. The interest graph remains intact even when brands make poor marketing decisions.
I think counting users that click a like button off-Facebook is probably still valid - it's likely that Facebook will be serving ads off-Facebook at some point.
I remember reading that Facebook counts anyone who clicks a like button on any website as being an active user which is certainly b.s. If you can't serve someone an ad (and that's your primary revenue stream), they aren't an active user.
Plus, they almost certainly count public page views to Facebook (like the link above), which means every new non-logged in session gets counted as a new user. It is totally valid in my opinion to count these, but they are hyper-inflationary.
I don't understand this logic. I've had great success in driving traffic my FB to websites, and for much lower cost than Adwords.
Buying FB page likes seems like a pointless exercise considering that only a tiny percentage of your users actually ever see your posts unless you boost them.
You both seem to be saying the same thing - actively clicking on a like button gets counted as a real genuine user of Facebook. That seems reasonable (one is logged in, and clicks something sending data to FB)
Neither of you have said just having FB button appear on a 3rd party site counts - that would get what 3bn users :-)
Facebook somehow allows a website to determine whether the user likes a page or not. I've seen websites asking users to click Like (basically liking a page that paid the money to the click farm) in order the view the content. This kind of Like bait is extremely popular, and Facebook basically allow content publishers to trick users in this manner easily.
Sites using the like button are dumb to begin with, especially if they are in e-commerce. You’re handing your competitors an ability to do lookalike targeting of your customers via Facebook ads. This is one of the biggest advantages of that platform. Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook’s profits.
I think this author fails to understand the business model of selling the user data to marketing companies.
That 'like' is a data-point about that user which which adds to the mass of data that FB sells. Also, the 'like' promotes that product within the system providing content for FB visitors to feed on. It isn't even a loss leader, it's a part of building their content.
The off-site 'like' has as much value to FB as the YouTube player adds to YouTube, and is a small percentage of the value that AdWords (or have I got the wrong product) provides to Google.
Of course he's not claiming anything doesn't 'fit' in his data. That would require screwing up basic arithmetic about clicks. The author didn't claim to be tricked by facebook. He was surprised by the order of magnitude differences. Why don't you see that surprise as valid? And of course the article doesn't give the data to explain why, because the author doesn't know.
"Yes, I do remember why I liked things in batches. Facebook suggests things for you to like in the right column on some pages. As soon as you click to like one of them, it replaces it with another suggestion. I’m quite happy to like thousands of things on Facebook as it improves the kind of stories and ads that come up in my news feed and again in the right column. I would rather see things I am interested in than things I’m not."
A little different than the typical idea of a Reader's Digest granny who doesn't understand the internet. Unlike the problem with display ads, in this case Facebook's UI purposefully encourages clicks based on user intent that is highly unrelated to the ad itself. Plus, as a FB advertiser you can actually see the profiles so you can see that these folks are heavy-duty clickers...and if you check the numbers carefully, you can also see that FB invalidates some of the clicks from the folks who like your page, since at some point the behavior is clearly indefensible. However, FB still leaves them attached to the page, since in the end FB can't tell if they really meant to click on your ad or not. And they don't appear to go back and invalidate previous or subsequent clicks from that invalidated user. They just trim off a few.
I consider this unethical business behavior on the part of Facebook. And since I also believe in caveat emptor, I wanted to make sure to get the caveats out there for any emptors who are interested.
"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.
Like button has nothing to do with people liking something.
It has everything to do with Facebook tracking users on 3rd party web pages. This way they know where you have been, for how long and how often. IMO this data is much more relevant to knowing users interests that enables FB to sell targeted ads.
Same goes for Google Analytics: that's the reason it is free - because you are the product.
This doesn't make sense to me as a user or as a page admin.
As a user, if my friends post something I want to see it. If my daughter's karate school or my favorite band posts something, I want to see it. If they're spammy, I'll unsubscribe. I would like to make this decision for myself, not have it made for me. If it has to be made for me, I would prefer it be made based on some approximation of relevance and quality, not because someone paid $5 to spam me with it.
As an advertiser, Facebook has consistently promoted ads as a way to build a following via the 'like' button. So I pay Facebook to gain exposure to build a following of 10,000 fans and now I have to pay again if I want to reach them all?? Classic bait and switch. I wonder how many past advertisers would have paid to build up their 'likes' if they had been told very clearly up front "Just because someone likes your page does not mean they will see your posts in their news feed".
First, this gives facebook a huge database of the Internet. Essentially, if they wanted to release a stumbleupon equivalent, they could. Or if they wanted to target ads even closer to your interests, they could. This makes me feel (more) nervous about facebook.
Second, I've always been really interested in finding the best webpages on the Internet. Unfortunately, this is another one of those metrics that conflates popularity with quality. If we assume that X% will press the like button (where X is different for every website), and Y people visit the site, then we have a total number of likes = X*Y/100. But since X only goes from 1-100, it's pretty easy to see that popularity has a much larger affect on how many likes a site will get than how good it actually is.
Essentially, the number of likes is a meaningless statistic (except to measure popularity).
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