I love analytics, SEO, and all things related; one part of tracking how well your website traffic is doing is of course Social Media; Facebook, Twitter, Reddit the usual. Take Facebook for instance, as we all know, Facebook relies on people liking content, the simple thumbs up provides a wealth of data to be mined for use in advertising. If you look at Facebook pages for some wargaming websites you will notice a wide gap between the small sites and large sites. There is also some oddities, like for instance, Beasts of War. This wargaming news site has been around for quite some time and I have chronicled some of its difficulties in the past. Beasts of War has done a pretty good job of generating organic likes for their Facebook page, but something very strange happened this week.
In the last week Beasts of War has generated over 10k likes! Here is a screen shot of what I mean.
As you can see this is huge jump from the previous week. What is also interesting is the most engaged city of Dhaka, Bangladesh! I never knew Dhaka was the epicenter of Wargaming? Well I know surprise, surpise, but Dhaka isn't the Wargaming center you might think, instead it is the low wage "click farm" capital of the world.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/02/click-farms-appearance-online-popularity
Nothing says friends like slave labor ones, regardless of the ethical problems using this sort of "like" boosting, it also sends the completely wrong message to potential advertisers. If you look at the Beast of War webpage you will notice it heavily spammed with advertising. When a potential customer comes looking to pay for adspace they will be sold a fake bag of site popularity. Making it even worse, Beast of War is also using these click farms to make stories appear more popular than they really are, just take a look at this post.
First off, notice the comments. Who is Al Masum Khan? Well if you look at who he likes, reviews, and such you can see a pattern that doesn't sound so consistent with some living in Bangladesh. Then you can look at the people who are liking the article.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100007758855873
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100004266409372
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008462348283
More folks from Bangladesh, all with scant information or female, hardly the wargaming demographic. This is no way to generate traffic for your website. It also will give your advertisers a false sense of who is actually liking their products. You can get away with it if you site already has millions of organic likes, but not in this situation. Beast of War should be ashamed not only of exploiting the 3rd world, but also basically being engaged in false advertising. If you site isn't big enough don't try to fake it, actually provide content people want to read or take marketing class to find out what you need to do, this is the cheap and easy why and one that will gain you nothing.
New Information
I have been contact by Beasts of War about the matter and it seems there is a possibility Facebook themselves is the culprit. Beasts of War claims they tried a promotion through Facebook own system and it generated this fake likes. The claim includes spending around $100 bucks causing the jump in new Likes. I have done similar promotions using some free Facebook credits, and as advertised spending only $100 bucks "should" generate you about 150-450 likes. In Beasts of War case they got upwards of 7-10k likes. Now, they also claim to had used a targeted promotion, which means they chose global campaign or a certain region. I have asked for a detailed explanation on this and still waiting for a response.
Personally, I find it unlikely 100 bucks can generate this sort of fake response. I suppose it is possible to say target Bangladesh itself and hope the bots come a calling. There is a lot of stories out their about fake Like farming, but Facebook is trying to crack down on the practice. So, I still find this unlikely Beasts of War had no knowledge of what they were doing, especially with the technical know how they seem to display. It completely didn't cross my mind it could be incompetence as well, which is a distinct possibility. As it is they still haven't removed the Fake likes, which I told them would be a good idea to protect themselves and their brand. Anyway, life calls will update this with any new information!
11-15-2014
I have waited a week for Beasts of War to contact me about their claims. I have not received an email from them detailing how this could have happened. For the sake of full disclosure I was asked to discuss this matter over voice chat, I turned it down because I wanted things in writing to avoid spin from either side. I did some research into the matter on my own without Beast of War giving me their full story and I stand by my statements because there is little evidence to suggest spending $100 bucks on your Facebook page would generate almost 10k new likes in less than a week. I have also deleted some unsavory Facebook comments on by page because Beasts of War fans have decided to take to trolling. I have left untouched all the Beast of War comments that provide information for or against my statements done in a constructive manner. I will be conducting an experiment almost identical to the one posted on Veritasium to see if I can duplicate what Beasts of War has alleged really happened. As it stands though, Beasts of War has instead decided to take to their own weekend show to disparage me and my post, which is fine, still doesn't change the fact those fake likes are still on their page.
Warning
Network News is rated: trending in the land of make believe importance of this blog