Advertising On Facebook For Likes Is A Waste Of Money.

Originaly published at CrowdSPRING Blog

We’ve experimented with many advertising and marketing channels over the years, including Facebook. A few years ago we tested whether promoting our posts on the crowdSPRING Facebook Fan page could expose us to more potential customers. We received more likes and fans, but discovered that our new fans were not engaging with us.

During our experiments, we varied our targeting – sometimes our targeting was broad and at other times, specific. We tested custom audiences. We repeated our experiments and confirmed our results: advertising on Facebook for likes is a waste of money.

In fact, the problem is even worse than it initially seems. In addition to wasting your money, you also negatively impact your ability to engage your real customers and fans.

Remember that your advertising dollars ensure that your posts would appear on News Feeds of your fans, their friends, and perhaps other targeted customers. If more people engage with your posts, your posts would be more prominently displayed. In fact, Facebook’s algorithm is built to reward posts that have strong engagement. However, many of your advertising dollars are spent to display your promoted posts in the News Feeds of phony accounts that never engage or interact with the promotions. More importantly, when you later post non-promoted content, that content is also shown to phony accounts that never interact/engage with your content. As a consequence, your overall ability to reach your fans and customers suffers.

Here’s a terrific video from Veritasium discussing their own experiments and their similar conclusion that advertising on Facebook for likes is wasteful.