I bought ads through Facebook on my old bands page and I can certainly attest to this. The issue got so bad that we actually had to shut down our page and start a fresh one.
"so I'm thinking based on our research we should skip touring the U.S. Save up some money and concentrate on touring in Asia. For whatever reason they're really into us."
Because of the way Facebook's algorithms work the new likes from the ad meant that the people who actually cared about our posts stopped seeing them. We went from averaging 3-5 likes per post with 1k likes to 0-2 likes per post with 2.5k likes. Because there's no way to get rid of the fake likes it was back to square one.
Steve: [completely doped on nitrous oxide] ... But, this map is heavy... It's got all of those... robes on it. Robes? Rogues? Mike: [also stoned; giggling] Roads! Steve, Mike: Aahahahaha! Mike: [suddenly stops laughing] I'm stoned... so are you!
[looks in the backseat] Mike: Dammit! The nitrous oxide's leaking into the car! OK, calm down... we just gotta keep under the speed limit... limit... [starts giggling again] Mike: Limit! Haha, that's another one of those freaky words! source
To expand, if you have 10,000 facebook Page likes, and you post an article the following will happen:
Post gets published, out of the 10,000 people who like the page, 5 people get shown the post.
If someone likes the post, 3 more people get shown the post. If another person or two likes it, 10 more people see the post.
So let's say you have 10,000 likes, and only 5 are real, you have a much larger chance of fake accounts seeing your post, and never interacting with them, thus not showing the post to your other followers.
Stumbleupon uses a very similar algorithm, once a link is posted it gets shown to 5 or so people, from there it goes up or down.
DDOS'ing involves millions of hits for large servers. No one is getting a thousand hits and thinking, oh no malicious DDOS!!! Not to be rude, just letting you know.
My band has about 400 likes. With 5$ "boosted" I reach instead of the usual 250+ fans(with a couple shares and comments and a few likes) to upwards of 1000+ views(with a few shares and a bunch of likes/comments). The option I just experimented with was targeting my boosted audience, but it yielded worse results then the standard.
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u/punkrok97 Oct 27 '14
I bought ads through Facebook on my old bands page and I can certainly attest to this. The issue got so bad that we actually had to shut down our page and start a fresh one.