Facebook Ads: Do they really work ?

Here is an experiment that I thought I should put on the blog. Recently Facebook provided me with a free Rs 1500 advertisement credit and I thought I should give it a try. I had created a page an year back and through direct emails/contacts, I had managed to get 40-50 likes on the page. I thought why not promote the page now that I have some free credit. I created a small ad, set a budget of Rs 100 per day, selected my target audience as young kids between the age of 14-18 years, living in India and interested in Education. And voila! It worked!


In the next 3 days, Facebook used my daily budget of Rs 100 and I got approximately 100-150 likes per day on the page. I was happy and I started posting updates on the page which should have enticed my targeted audience and then wait for them to like and promote those posts which in turn would have brought more people to my page. Remember these are young college going kids and would have friends with similar liking/interest and age group. But surprisingly, I did not receive a single like on any of my post. I tried posting a question that nobody answered. While its entirely possible that I did a poor job building the content on the page, but if it was the right audience, at least one of those 400 would have found the post interesting ?


I got suspicious about the quality of the audience and I started checking profiles of some of them. They looked quite fake to me, most of them hidden and couple of open profiles that could find, those folks were liking pages at a rate of 90-100 pages every hour and with no correlation whatsoever between those pages. Doesn't look quite right, yeah ?


I then did one more experiment and I started promoting an individual post on the page for a budget of Rs 290. And voila! Once again I am lucky and suddenly more and more people are liking that post and my promotion budget is being consumed at a rate that would make me bankrupt soon had I not set the limit and had I not been using free credit from Facebook :-)


After 3 days, I stopped the page promotion and since then I haven't received a single like on the page. Another interesting data point is: from my original 40-50 likes, the count of reachable fans which Facebook defines as "the total number of friends of fans" was around 15K. When the likes went up to 500, the friends count now is around 17K. Together this shows how poor the virality of these additional fans is.


This experiment raises a lot of questions.

1. Are there people around who would like any page or post that comes as promotion to them ? If so, why ? Why do they do that ?
2. Are there companies hiring people to just create fake profiles and help companies boost their fan count ? May be it helps them for raising money from investors ? But are investors really stupid to not know that ?
3. Since in this entire exercise, only Facebook had any direct chance of generating revenue, is Facebook itself hiring people (most likely indirectly) to like promoted pages/posts or answer promoted questions ?

I personally think there is more to this entire like/promotion business than meets the eyes. May be intelligent people already know that and they are dumping Facebook stock at a rate that would soon make it another Zynga.

Don't sign your credit card slips blindly!

Next time when a waiter at your favorite restaurant or a person at your nearest petrol pump hands over a credit card authorization slip to you, make sure you read it carefully before you sign and give it back. You might be being cheated and you may not ever know unless you are in habit of reading your credit card statements carefully.

Couple of months back, on my way to fast-drive journey to Bombay, I stopped at the HP petrol pump operated by Sai Services to feed my baby Palio (what a car it is!). I asked the guy to put petrol worth Rs 500. He did that, took my credit card, swiped and came back. As usual I was about to sign the authorization slip without even looking at the amount, but suddenly I realized; the slip was showing amount of Rs 1000. When I asked, the guy was like "Oops! Sorry Sir. The other customer filled petrol worth Rs 1000, so I mistakenly swiped for Rs 1000". I smiled and he happily gave me back Rs 500 cash (I was happy too. I got the cash and kept the reward points too :-))

One week later, at the same petrol pump, the same incident happened again. This time I became suspicious and in strong words reprimanded the guy that this seems like a fraudulent practice and probably he is cheating customers who are not watchful enough to check their receipts.

Yesterday, it happened with me again, though at a different petrol pump (HP pump near the Agriculture College, Shivajinagar). This time I decided to report the matter to the manager. I can't believe that the same incident can happen three times in two months and every time it was just a mistake. I am sure there something fishy about this.

So guys be careful when you sign your slip next time. May be you are the chosen victim this time. Also subscribe for mobile alerts for credit card transactions and read your credit card statements regularly. Well, I too need to start reading my statements henceforth.