The Great Facebook “Boost”: How Click Farms Make Facebook's Paid Promos a Scam
I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.<p>It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.<p>Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.<p>One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.<p>Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.<p>Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.