Back in August, Reuters reported that Facebook was launching a massive effort to purge its system of fake profiles and the fake Likes that resulted from them. It was big news for the social media giant, which had pledged in 2010 to reduce Facebook spam, in part by reducing fake profiles, Likes and deceptive practices aimed at gaining Likes. At the time, Facebook estimated that the purge would hit about 1 percent of the Likes on the average corporate page. It took nearly a month for the change to actually be implemented, but when Facebook actually set the purge, which TechCrunch cleverly dubbed “Operation Unlike,” in action, it sent an uncomfortable ripple through some of the biggest and most-liked games and pages on the social media site.
On the morning of September 26, TechCrunch’s Josh Constine posted the soothing news that owners of Facebook business pages shouldn’t fret about their lost fans. After all, he pointed out, Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘Em Poker page had just shed more than 96,000 fans. While that sounds like a lot of lost Likes, Constine pointed out, it amounted to only about .15 percent of the page’s actual likes – considerably lower than Facebook’s own estimates.
Facebook’s own estimates actually fell far short of the damage that could have been done by the great purge of Operation Unlike. The company’s SEC filing noted that approximately 8.7 percent of its reported 955 million active monthly users were “fake” to some extent. The company based its data on internal reviews of a limited set of sample data, pointed out an article at Huffington Post, and on the judgment of human reviewers.
A further breakdown of the 8.7 percent statistic notes that more than half of those are duplicate pages, created by users in addition to their main profile, and another 2.4 percent were “user-misclassified” profiles, such as personal profiles for a business, which should be a business page. The remaining 1.5 percent are profiles created by users that the Facebook defines as “undesirable” – profiles that were created specifically to violate the Facebook Terms of Service.
The Timing of Operation Unlike
The timing of Operation Unlike suggests that it may have been launched in response to growing publicity about fake profiles, Likes and clicks on Facebook ads. In July, the BBC reported on several business owners and investigative reporters who believed that their Facebook ad expenditures had been greatly expanded by fake clicks from users with fake profiles. At the time, Facebook responded with a statement that fake Likes and profiles were statistically a very small number, but the controversy continued to brew. If the purge of fake Facebook profiles didn’t stem from the growing reports, the timing is suspiciously coincidental.
Lessons Learned from Operation Unlike
In the immediate aftermath of the shakeup, most bloggers and commenters focused on the obvious OMG factor, but there were also lessons to be learned from the Facebook purge. These are the takeaways that a business owner who wants to use Facebook advertising should have picked up from the whole episode.
Don’t Buy Likes
There’s a fairly healthy underground economy in Facebook Likes – and it’s strictly against the Facebook Terms of Service to buy or sell clicks on ads, Likes or Shares. While a lot of promoters will promise you that they can deliver “legitimate” Likes, if you’re paying for them, they’re not legitimate.
Keep an Eye on Your Data
Early on, Facebook reported that very few people had complained about fake Likes and clicks on their Facebook ads. The reasons for that probably stem from a number of things. Companies who bought Likes, for example, were hardly going to complain about the fake profiles that were Liking their pages. Others may not ever have looked into the in-depth analytics provided by Facebook to see where the Likes and clicks were coming from. Watch your analytics, make a note of any trends, and speak up to Facebook if you notice something suspicious.
Target Your Ads
In the earliest reports on BBC, a British entrepreneur deliberately started a fake Facebook page with the intent of tracking ad performance and Like acquisition. He reported that up to 80 percent of the clicks on his ads appeared to come from fake profiles, many of them in the Philippines and Egypt. When Facebook looked into the test case at the request of BBC, they discovered the crucial fact that the advertiser had designated Egypt as a company he specifically wanted to target. Based on that, it seems that Facebook targeting actually works quite well.