Is the Facebook Fraud Video a Fraud?

A lot of people have asked me about the “Facebook Fraud” video from Veritasium.  If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out below.

Let’s just talk about the video itself.  It’s extremely well done.  It makes it appear very scientific and I had lots of people send me the video.  What is really impressive is that this guy created a very viral video.

Now, I disagree with his conclusion that Facebook ads are a waste of money; however, that doesn’t make the video false.  In fact, there are lots of people who don’t use Facebook’s targeting in a constructive way who end up spending money on Facebook ads that don’t convert, get leads, or sales.

I think that is what made the video go so viral — that there are so many people having a hard time with profitable Facebook ads.  That’s what I want to talk about here:  What is the right strategy for success using Facebook ads?

Let’s continue to look at the video.  It addresses three main examples.

First: The Virtual Bagel experiment from 2012.

They spent $100 in Facebook ads and they targeted countries like India, Egypt, Russia, Malaysia, and the Philippines and for some reason seemed surprised when that didn’t turn into any quality fans.

Second: Facebook advertising for the Veritasium page.

What they were showing is how they made some pretty fancy graphs that showed 80,000 of his likes, (or what he says is 75%) comes from developing countries, which results in 1% of his page engagement. But what he’s never clear about is how he targeted and who he targeted in his ad. It just seemed that it was very broad. He says that it brought meaningless likes that didn’t result in engagement.

To a Facebook marketer it seems very obvious that if you were to advertise to countries that don’t give the engagement that you want, well…it seems like he got the results that was intended.  To say it another way, while he intentionally advertises to countries like Russia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, he was saying that this resulted in 1% of his engagement from those countries. I don’t really know why anybody would want to advertise to those countries if they didn’t have customers in those countries.

Third: The Virtual Cat Experiment.

He referred to a single post that he published on a Friday afternoon, that he called Virtual Cat, which reached only eight people and received no engagement.  Again, I think for anybody who’s actually trying to have a profitable experience on Facebook, you would never do your ads that way.

Click Farms.

He mentions that there are lots of click farms. Yes, there certainly are click farms. Yes, you should avoid them. Yes, they can be problematic.

The legitimate way of buying likes is through Facebook ads, but in his examples they targeted ads at countries where there are known click farms.  Some pages buying likes do this intentionally.  Some do it unknowingly.
These days, of course, we know better.
The main problem that I agree with that is highlighted in the video is that most people who are doing Facebook ads are not making money off of their Facebook ads. I agree and that is why I am in business and I’m so passionate about helping people. If you do a Facebook ad strategy that is slow and steady where you add a lot of value and you use targeted Facebook ads, my experience has been very positive using Facebook ads.

Another main problem that I see within the video is that they didn’t use anything like custom audiences, conversion tracking, look-alike audiences, or partner categories.  They didn’t look into any Facebook new ad reports.  There’s just a tremendous amount of tools that Facebook provides that they weren’t using. I also recognize that most people don’t know how to use these tools; however, using these tools has led to a really positive Facebook marketing experience for us.

If your ads are poorly targeted, they won’t work.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody that the ads in the Veritasium video were very poorly targeted.

If you target countries that are not relevant to your customers, you’re going to end up with likes that aren’t worth anything. Also, if you do advertisements to an audience that is far too broad, such as people who love cats, you’re not going to get high quality fans.

If you instead make your Facebook strategy around adding value to your customers and attracting a relevant audience largely through what I call social proof ads and discovery ads, then you can come up with a realistic, long-term, sustainable Facebook strategy that can work.

Stay tuned for more on social proof ads and discovery ads.  In the coming weeks, we’re going to show you the basics of how to do those.  If you’d like to dive into that right now, go ahead and sign up here.

The last thing that I want to mention is that Facebook has explicitly told marketers in recent months that Facebook works best as a marketing tool if you build a real fan base that you can advertise to in a more targeted way than simply advertising to non-fans.

It comes back to if you can focus on adding value to your customers (giving away free value, in the form of educational free webinars for example), turn browsers into fans and then turn fans into customers.  You can attract those people largely through Facebook ads.  That is the long-term, sustainable strategy that can reap wonderful rewards.