Be sure to watch through to the end for the conclusion! I'll summarise:
Click farms like every page they can, far more than just the pages they were paid to like; the theory is that they will evade detection this way. Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes. In this way facebook ads give a huge, but useless, gain in "Likes".
Actually there is a fundamental reason why you're exposed to click farms: because fb exposes your ad to a small sample size of your audience first. Then based on the engagement the ad receives, it will target it more to those 'types' of people.
Since click farms are far far more engaged than the average fb user, this means that invariably, your ad will be steered actively by fb towards click farms!
So if you pay for fb ads you are in effect wasting your money because fb is forcing your ad to be shown to those who shouldn't see your ads.
And if you don't pay either for legitimate or fraudulent likes, you will still get a large fake following because they are using you to disguise their activity.
"Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes."
Does that matter? I mean, obviously if you're trying to work out whether it's worth paying for Facebook ads, it's worth being aware that a large number of Likes isn't necessarily a sign of a successful ad, but you don't know the "value" of a Like in advance anyway. If you discover that every 1,000 Likes you get 10 more sales (or whatever), then you can work out whether it's worth spending money for an ad that will likely bring in 1,000 Likes, whether 990 of those likes are "genuine" Likes that don't turn into sales, or 990 of the Likes are click farm Likes.
I mean, I've never advertised on Facebook, I don't know anything about it, but I would have thought you need to measure the actual effectiveness of your ads; whether click farm fake Likes are contributing to this overall effectiveness or not doesn't seem relevant to the end result.
You didn't watch the video. More likes means a larger percentage of your "likers" AREN'T engaged which will actually show content to FEWER of the people who are actually interested. Having 2850/3000 of your likes being farmed means when FB does a "sampling" by only showing content to a few of your likers it has a lower chance of actually hitting a non-farm account.
And frankly, the whole thing is fucking ridiculous to even have to explain. FB does all sorts of shady/hacky shit to make money in a way that is totally incongruous with the needs and desires of both content consumers and content creators. Someone will come along with a simpler model that makes sense, and everyone will move away from facebook like they did from digg->reddit.
I doubt there's any trivial solutions to this, but one simple scenario would be to limit the amount of 'likes' an account can have..but that could also cause FB to implode.
Well, there is one solution which wasn't mentioned in the video, get the bots to like your posts so they get visibility leading to actual users seeing them.
Facebook determines post visibility based on engagement. If a high percentage of your likes are fraudulent and don't engage, that means that the initial group your post is shown to is less likely to engage, and, in turn, your post is less likely to be seen by legitimate followers since the low engagement means Facebook won't expand the percentage of your followers that see it in the first place.
According to the video, the click farmers will like the page itself, but not any content it posts.
If your page likes are mostly fake, your posts likes will be proportionately lower.
The auther discovered that Facebook tests your posts among your following, and uses the % that liked the post as a signal as to whether it should show it to the rest of your network.
Now, if you are paying farmers for likes, they might also be liking the content you post. If you're not paying for likes at all, but you have a bunch of fake likes on your page, your posts will get proportionately fewer likes, and FB will show your post to fewer people.
The point was ultimately:
By buying likes, legitimately or not, your page will attract likes from fake accounts -- Which due to the aforementioned reasons will tank the presence of your page in the news feed of real users.
The only workaround from this position is to promote your posts either through legitimate or illegitimate means.
The other byproduct of this notion is that using the free coupons that Facebook tends to offer can cause more damage than they are supposedly supposed to fix.
Yep, this is possible and a much better use of ad spend that's allocated for FB. The only downside is the admin required to single out individual posts for paid (fake) promotion.
It's also a much cheaper method than paying FB to promote to your click farm fans.
Well, if he could identify these accounts as illegitimate, surely Facebook could automatically do the same with their vast amount of data. However, they really have no incentive to do so. The average advertiser just wants to see a higher like count, and they're not paying as much attention as they should to actual conversions. If Facebook can serve 5x as many likes, with the help of illegitimate users, and no one is complaining about low conversions, they're not going to stop. Why chase down the click farms, if they're generating 80% of your revenue for free?
Click farms like every page they can, far more than just the pages they were paid to like; the theory is that they will evade detection this way. Paying for "legitimate" facebook exposure will expose you to the click farms as well, and that will be the absolute majority of your gained likes. In this way facebook ads give a huge, but useless, gain in "Likes".