Click Farms and Your Facebook Ad Campaign

If you are a business that looking for exposure from Facebook using Facebook ads, you aren’t alone – this option has become very popular. After all, there are around 1.2 billion users, making it a powerful place for an ad.

Many an advertiser has been hooked by Facebook’s ‘Suggested Page’ or ‘Suggested Post’ – both are offered at a reasonable rate. The purpose of these ads it to earn likes for your advertised pages, and earn business an increase in audience for the posts they make. 

At a glance, it would seem like a strategy that was worth pursuing – after all, it appears to work. Many a business has increased their likes through this exposure. When a person ‘likes’ a business fan page that person will see your updates on their newsfeed and they might also share those poses with their friends, which is the main way of gaining a Facebook audience. 

Recently Business Insider published an article that talked about the complaints being made by a number of Facebook page owners, saying their ads have created chaos on their pages. The businesses say that far too many of their new likes are actually coming from ‘click farms.’ This is a practice where a company hires low paid workers to conduct a number of tasks that are designed to boost traffic to a site. 

But these Facebook page business owners are paying for legitimate traffic so these ‘click farms’ are very annoying. 

The next problem becomes “Why would click farms pay people to click like on Facebook pages?” They do this because ‘likes’ help to legitimize a Facebook profile, and give the appearance there is a real person associated with the profile.

Facebook knows there is a problem and has been working on pinpointing and deleting fake accounts from the site. There is an estimate that 0.4% to 1.2% are Facebook likes. However, when 1% of your base clicks the button thousands of times in a day this creates a real problem – a serious problem. 

One request Facebook business page owners have made is to give them the ability to delete fake accounts in bulk. Currently you need to delete them one by one, which is tedious and a waste of time leading to hundreds of thousands of fake profiles building up.

They’ve also asked Facebook to eliminate access to the countries that pose the problem such as India, Brazil, Portugal and Mexico among others. 

Currently this remains a Facebook issue for advertisers. Facebook seems to have bigger worries than advertisers voicing their displeasure. These fake profiles are said to have disrupted Facebook’s ad revenue by about 63% in just the last quarter. 

P.P.S 

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