Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,
Not uttered by based sale of chapmen’s tongues.
So, like, what’s a Like worth anyway? I mean a Facebook Like. Well, for starters, like, Facebook is valued at like more than 120 times its earnings, so, like, the concept “value” is like, y’know, hard to define. Likes are indeed currency, though good luck trying to figure out the exchange rate. For most of us, a Like is just a casual, and usually literal, means of expressing appreciation among friends. Like the new baby pics, Like that smart or funny comment you made, Like that you wished me good luck or Happy Birthday, and so on. And while all that Liking does yield data for Facebook, which is fed into the box of dark magic that conjures what may or may not be useful market research in the social media age; Likes for business, organization, or cause promotion are another matter altogether. And you know this because if you create a Facebook page for one of these things, Facebook will immediately let you know that you can broaden your exposure by paying for Facebook advertising.
There’s a classic advertiser’s quote, often attributed to David Ogilvy (though maybe not correctly), that says, “I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” Waste is the advertiser’s dilemma; nobody wants to spend money advertising to people who will never be customers, and the best traditional solutions to this have been based in demographics and broad market research, which trades in old-school likes (e.g. consumers who like football also like beer). The advertiser of a sports car, for instance, can’t entirely avoid waste, but he can put commercials against programs known to be watched by his most likely customers based on market research.
The Internet is supposed to do better than that for advertisers. Rather than spray-and-pray sports car ads at men in a target demo, the hope has been that the advertiser can reach Steve, who is actively looking for a sports car right now. Much of the design of the Internet as we know it is built with an aim to achieve this goal and not whatever altruistic, social progress is being spun in the PR departments of social media giants. One irony, to me anyway, is that I actually find Facebook to be a largely positive social network, which is not where it derives its market valuation; yet, I am very skeptical of its worth as an advertising network, which is where it derives market valuation. I won’t lie: I’ve enjoyed connecting with old friends, making new friends, keeping up with people, and kibitzing on Facebook; but I bet I’m not alone in saying that I am probably less brand aware today than I ever was in the days when I only had one screen in my life and a limited number of channels.
If anything, I find the obvious advertising on Facebook is either utterly missable or utterly obnoxious. The only times ads have caught my attention on the network have been negative attention. For instance, when Facebook tells me that a friend “Likes” a certain big corporation (e.g. Sam Likes Bank of America), it only attracts because I know it isn’t true, and I find myself wondering a) where Facebook gets the nerve to say this? b) what idiot thinks this is good marketing for BofA? and c) what am I endorsing that I don’t know about? Similarly, I’m sure we all notice that Facebook will very quickly feature ads for items we browsed online within minutes of said browsing, and maybe this is an effective sale closer sometimes, but certainly not if it’s an item we just bought. In this case, the ad just elicits a well-deserved sneer.
So, in the pursuit of “Steve,” that real customer, I often wonder whether these rather ham-handed efforts do not represent the new “waste” in advertising, particularly in light of what has surely been lost in recent years, which is consumer relationships built on brand identity. In the 1990s, advertisers were still very much talking about relationships, but today, it seems the word is engagement, meaning interactions through social media. And believe me, I honestly think there are a million smart ways to build relationships through these platforms, but it’s not clear that there is much value to the Facebook Like.
The owner of a business, organization, or cause page on Facebook can purchase Likes through two mechanisms — one supposedly above board, the other not so much. Paying for Facebook ads is the legit, and at least somewhat organic, way to attract valid, engaged interest in a page. The not so kosher approach is to buy clicks through a third party that simply pays foreign labor in what are called “Click Farms” to sit and click on things at a rate of about $1 per 1000 clicks. (I know, it’s a job that just screams innovation and prosperity, right?) But this is how many a Facebook page acquires tens of thousands of Likes, which are less than worthless in the pursuit of engaged prospective customers, readers, or supporters of your cause.
Unfortunately, according to Derek Muller, creator and host of the YouTube science and tech series Veritasium, buying Facebook ads seems to generate roughly the same worthless pile of Likes as buying third-party Likes. In fact, Muller explains that, based on the way Facebook algorithms test and then broaden the reach of posts in response to apparent engagement, having tens of thousands of bogus Likes actually reduces exposure to people who are legitimately interested in your page. The reason Muller gives for the Facebook ad buy attracting just as many fake Likes is that Click Farmers actually click on stuff for free (i.e. pages they haven’t been paid to click on) in order to hide their identities in the vast confusion of clicks throughout the network. In short, so that nobody notices a sudden Like spike on one particular page from, say, the Philippines. Muller doesn’t accuse Facebook of intentionally selling fake Likes, and this is probably fair; but I still wonder what a real Like is really worth.
I recommend watching the video. Muller is very entertaining, and the whole series looks great. Had I first seen it on Facebook, I like totally would have Liked it.
