According to the BBC, many of them could be. A report from the broadcaster claims that a high proportion of ‘likes’ could be from users not in the least bit interested in your product.</p> <p>BBC cites false Facebook “likes” </p> <p>Of course this begs the question – why did they ‘like’ you in the first place? To understand what is going on here, we need to take a look at what exactly the BBC is talking about. The research cited was two sources of information, one being a marketing consultant’s experiences in running Facebook ads for small businesses, and the second a BBC experiment in which they set up their own page for a fake company.</p> <p>According to the consultant, a number of his clients were getting ‘likes’ through ad clicks from fans who “were 13 to 17 years old”, with suspicious names and details. After targeting internationally the BBC experiment found a similar result, with the Philippines and Egypt heavily over-represented. </p> <p>Untargeted ads bound to fail</p> <p>Well, the first thing that this suggests is not that Facebook ads don’t work, but that actually the targeting was all wrong – if young consumers aren’t the target audience, why are they seeing the ad in the first place? The BBC campaign sent out a scattergun ad, with no targeting – is it any wonder that the ‘likes’ that resulted weren’t valuable? Facebook allows very niche targeting of users by age and demographics; ads that don’t take advantage of these deserve to fail. </p> <p>The more reasonable conclusion would be that untargeted ads don’t work – which applies to any media, online or off, and shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.<br />