The mysterious history of 900 Facebook-likes …

Conclusion: 90% of my money spent on Facebook promotional tools was wasted.

On July 30th I promoted one of my Facebook posts about our International Daily Deal Satisfaction survey.I used our Holaba page on Facebook to invite people in several countries to participate in a survey for our 2nd brand (Dataotuan) that tracks the Daily Deals in several non-US-countries. I stopped the campaign after 10 days and $200 spent.

569.496 people saw my post, 1.229 liked the Holaba page and 0 participated in the survey.

It was the most popular post I ever posted on Facebook (in terms of reach)

I ran 2 campaigns and spent $200 in 10 days.

1/ Very “unsegmented” in countries where we have an active Dataotuan presence targeting + 20 million users.2/ A lot more targeted on Deal related tags and adding countries where we planned to start operating.

As you can see we reached 1000’s of Facebook members in Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Cairo was absolutely on top of all the rest. We wondered why that was happening.

Even more surprised we were with all the likes we got from again Egypt (Cairo and Alexandria) and Malaysia. More likes than we ever expected …. and all likes that we weren’t looking for.We were looking for people to participate in our survey.

To find out why we had plenty of likes and no survey participants I sent a mail to some of the participants… since it was clear from the ad they could only win an Amazon coupon when they did the survey. We didn’t ask them to “Like” the Holaba page. There isn’t even a thing called Holaba outside of China.

I sent out a first batch on July 31st on which no-one replied.

And I sent out a 2nd one on august 9th on which again no one replied. It started to smell.

On August 9th I got a mail from 2 ladies, who told me they “liked” my page and they could offer me more likes if I wanted. I replied to them with the same “Thank you”-mail as all the others and didn’t ask them to deliver me more “likes”.

When I wanted to get back to the original mail they sent me (offering me their services) I couldn’t. All their mails gone. Strange.

The results so far• I spent $200 on Facebook to get people participating in the survey.• Of the 600K people who “saw” the post (and didn’t do the survey) about 900 liked

the Holaba page. • There was absolutely no reason for them to like the page (you could only win

Amazon coupons when you participated in the survey).• Are these real people who liked the page? • If yes, why did they like the page?• And why don’t they answer when we asked them?• We end up with +900 likes of which only 10% are real likes.• And 0 persons participated in our survey

A couple of months later I wanted to promote the survey again – using the new version of promotional tool– but I could only promote a similar post to the 1.140 users who liked my page and their friends. And if you remember 900 of those are the mysterious Facebook-users. So how mysterious would their friends be.

I could select a $5/$10 payment to reach 630-1K/1k-2k, to reach the people who liked the page.

Or I could pay more if I also wanted to reach the friends of the people who liked the Holaba-page.

And that’s what I did (the reach was estimated at 2K persons)

The people who liked the Holaba page before (and their friends) could then see an ad like this one.

9274 people saw this last post. Luckily this time we had only a few new “likes” …. probably even real people. But in the end we hardly had any new participants in the Survey.

I also contacted again the girls that wanted to sell me “likes” before. And this time one of them answered with the link to a site where I could buy “likes” ….

Which of course I didn’t.

This is the site. 1000’s and 1000’s of “likes” almost for free.

We didn’t try it out. Since we don’t need empty likes. Only survey-participants.

The final conclusion.

• No one participated in the survey• We only got “likes”• 90% of the “unsolicited” likes on the Holaba-page are now

“mysterious” likes.• 90% of the money I may spend from now on to promote any

post on Holaba will be wasted.

Does that mean 90% ad spend on Facebook is wasted?

We are still looking for more participants in our survey. Tell us your "best or worst" daily deal experience and win 1 of the 10 Amazon gift coupons of $50 each. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TFY9PNB

Made by• Jan van den Bergh• Partner Holaba.com.cn/Dataotuan.com• jevedebe@gmail.com• Any question/comments, please contact me