“We’ve Removed Some Fake Likes” Warning on Facebook?

Recently, Facebook has started sending out notifications at the top of a page, visible only to the admin, when they remove fake likes from that page. This has set a number of webmasters on edge. Many believe that any loss of likes, real or fake, is a huge blow to their business. I’m going to take a moment to discuss why that’s not true, and why this is typically a good thing, no matter what percentage of your likes are removed.

Why Authentic Likes Matter

Well, for one thing, Facebook cares about the realism of their likes. If the site was overrun by fake likes, the fake like economy would crash. Where you might find one like valuable before, you might need a thousand likes for equivalent value. Pages with millions of followers would need trillions of likes on every post just to break even, and that hurts everyone.

Okay, so that’s not really what happens. However, a like on a page is supposed to signify a person – a real person – who is interested in your brand and what you have to say. When your page is full of followers, you have a wide interested audience. If your page is filled with fake likes, you might as well be delivering a seminar to a bunch of cardboard cutouts. Not only does it hurt your message to fall on fake ears; the few real followers in the crowd of fakes grow uncomfortable and leave.

Facebook also doesn’t like giving pages a workaround to their feed filtering. If they weighted likes more heavily, it would be possible for pages to purchase likes just to spread their message. In a sense, it’s because of fake likes that the individual like is as valueless as it is today.

Fake Likes and Insights

If you’re a veteran Facebook marketer, you’ll know how valuable the Insights system is. Through Insights, you can learn all sorts of interesting and useful information about your audience. You can find out where they live, in general. You can find out what they like. You can find out about their general demographic information. Most importantly, you use this information to target your ads.

Consider this scenario; you go into your Insights panel and look at your demographic information. You see that the majority of your audience is composed of young women, aged around 20, and that they tend to like various clothing brands. Use decide to use that information to target ads at other 20-something women who like clothing brands, to bring them into your audience. It works, and you bring in a number of great new followers, some of whom convert on the spot. That’s how the system is supposed to work.

Now imagine you look and you see the same information, but you notice that the majority of them come from India. This is strange, because you don’t sell your product in India. You shrug and decide to run the ads anyways. You get a whole bunch of new followers, but you see exactly zero conversions. You spent a bunch of money on ads, and got nothing out of it. It’s even worse if you spend money on other ad campaigns in India, where people don’t actually care.

Things get even worse if the fakes spoof their identities and look like they come from, say, California. Now you have a bunch of valley girls  as your demographic. What if the minority, though, are your real fans? They turn out to be 40-something males who live in New York. Yet here you are, spending ad money on ads targeted at California women. Your real demographic is left ignored, while the fake demographics suck up your ad spend and give you nothing in return.

There is, of course, the matter of organic reach as well, which is severely hampered by the presence of fake fans. Every fake fans that sees your message is a real opportunity lost.

Facebook’s Best Practices

Facebook has a few suggestions on fan-based best practices.

First, they advise that you focus on business objectives, not just followers. Yes, growing your following is important, but which matters more to you? Getting an extra hundred followers on Facebook, or getting one more monthly conversion on your website? By running ads and targeting posts such that you’re encouraging conversions and blog followers, you benefit more than you would through boosting your like count for no reason.

Second, don’t buy fake likes. About half of the time when you’re buying likes online, you know they’re fake and you know what you’re getting into. Don’t do it, no matter how tempting the offer may sound. The other half of the time, the seller is trying to pass their likes off as real. They’ll just end up removed, or worse; sitting around hurting you. Only buy likes from qualified sellers, businesses that run ad campaigns on private networks to get you real followers.

Third, learn your audience. More importantly, monitor your audience and watch for trends in an unusual demographic spiking. This can be an indication of fake likes, which can come from outside sources as well as your own accidental targeting mishaps. Try to minimize the actions that cause these spikes.

Why Fake Removal is Fine

If you get the fake like removal message – something like this – consider it a good thing. Facebook has your best interests in mind! They’re removing bots, fake accounts, spam accounts, inactive accounts, and memorialized accounts from your followers list. This has a number of great effects on your brand.

For one thing, it makes your audience Insights that much more accurate. Always check your Insights after such a fake fan removal! You might find out you’ve been targeting your ads a bit left of center, and the removal allows you to refine your targeting to better contact the people who are most interested in your brand. This will probably result in a conversion rate increase, possibly as soon as days after it happens.

For another thing, it broadens your reach. When fake fans are removed, those fans aren’t soaking up your messages. Instead, real fans will see your posts, and those fans will be more likely to like, share, and comment on your posts. When they do, it exposes your posts to that many more real and potential fans, dramatically increasing your organic and viral reach.

The only negative effects that come up from the removal of fake likes are the lowering of your follower count – which isn’t that important on its own – and the loss of any investment you had in fake followers. But then, you’re a smart webmaster; you haven’t been buying fake likes at all.

How Do I Remove the Fake Facebook Likes from My Page?

Fake Facebook fans can come from a number of different sources. The most common, obviously, is when you bought them. You might have bought them a long time a go, realized they weren’t valuable to your page, and ceased doing so but did nothing about the fans. You might have been buying them recently, thinking you were getting something you weren’t.

Another source of fake fans is, unfortunately, running Facebook ads. If your ads aren’t properly targeted, or they’re targeting the locations where fake fans are found, you’re going to accumulate them normally. See, most fake fans are powered by real people in clickfarms, and those people have to avoid certain like profiles. When Facebook detects a large number of accounts bearing certain characteristics, all mass-liking the same set of profiles at roughly the same times, it can reasonably determine that those profiles are fake for like-selling purposes.

To get around this detection, clickfarm employees are encouraged to go about liking other pages, to obfuscate their like profiles. One way they do this is by liking the pages they see in Facebook ads. Then, of course, once one clickfarm discovered your page, you’ll rake in fake likes from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of fake profiles.

So, sooner or later, you’re going to end up with a swath of fake likes on your page. Chances are they’re already there, particularly if you’ve had a profile for a long time.

Fake Likes Matter

By now, everyone knows that fake likes are bad for your page. They dilute your message but they don’t do anything beneficial in return. They never click your links, they never visit your website, they never buy your products, and in the case of fake likes brought in through ads, they eat up your ad budget for no reason.

In the past year, it’s become an even worse deal. Facebook has made changes to their algorithm expressly to punish pages that buy and keep fake likes. That means even if you have a few thousand likes from times past, you’ll end up facing the issues. Specifically, a proliferation of fake likes means decreased engagement and visibility.

Step 1: Value Determinations

The first step to removing fake likes is determining if you even should. Yes, all of the above has been focused on telling you how bad fake likes are. On the other hand, if you’re a company with millions of followers, digging through them to root out 1,000 fake followers isn’t going to be cost or time effective.

Essentially, you need to make an estimate of how many of your fans are fake. If there are a significant number of them, a distractingly high percentage, you should consider investing the time in removing them. You can also consider moving to a new Facebook page, but that can involve a lot of hassle and will start you at square one in terms of your audience.

Over time, Facebook will identify and remove fake accounts. As long as you’re not getting any new fakes, the number of fakes you have will decrease. However, this isn’t a wholly reliable way to remove all of your fake followers.

Step 2: Identify Fake Fans

If you have under 500 or so followers, you can go to Facebook’s fans icon and click the “See all” button. This list only loads 500 fans, and if you have more than that, you won’t be able to see them from this menu.

To see a longer list of your fans, you might need to use the Social Graph. It’s a tedious process to identify all of your fans, but you can get a complete list here.

How can you tell if your fans are fake? Look for indicators.

• Fake fans tend to be located in areas outside of your working area. If you only market in Minnesota, what use are fans based in Mexico, China or Indonesia? Even if they’re real people, they aren’t benefitting you all that much.
• How full is their profile? If they only have one picture, minimal information and a huge number of likes, they’re probably a fake account.
• Have they ever interacted with your page before, other than the initial like? Sure, plenty of people naturally don’t do much more than read your posts, but combined with other indicators, this can be a sign of a fake account.
• Is their profile picture copied from another source? You can do a reverse Google image search to find other places the picture has been used. If it’s the head of a number of other profiles, it’s probably a fake account.

Step 3: Removing Fake Fans

Removing fake fans is another tedious process. The easiest way to help deal with them is to report the user as a fake spambot account. This will help Facebook remove them from the site entirely. However, it doesn’t remove it from your page.

In that 500-limited Facebook fan readout, you can remove any fan following your page. However, this is only limited to the top 500 fans in the readout. By all means, remove any you can, but this doesn’t deal with the full extent of the problem.

In order to remove every fan, you need to take that list of users found in Social Graph. Every Facebook user has a unique URL. Copy that and use a service like Find My Facebook ID to find the numerical ID for that fan. Once you are done with this process, you will have a long list of fake fans sorted by ID number.

Now go back to the 500-limited “all fans” tab. Instead of clicking the gear icon, right-click it. You will want to choose “inspect element” here. It will pop up a window with the code of Facebook, the line for that button highlighted. In that line, you will see the Facebook ID number of the fan you are editing. Replace that ID number with one of the ID numbers of the fake fans, then click outside of the coding box to save the change.

Now, when you click to ban that user, you’re banning the fake user. It helps to do this while using a button related to another fake user, so if it goes wrong, you won’t accidentally remove a good user.

Now repeat as many times as it takes to remove all the fakes. It’s going to take forever, but it will help your reach in the end.

How Long Will My Facebook Ad Be Pending Review?

When you create a new Facebook ad, or you edit an old one, you’re taking a risk. That risk is the almighty Facebook gatekeeper. Every single ad that runs on the system needs to be reviewed by someone internally at Facebook. Ads must meet the advertising guidelines for approval before they can run.

The problem is, Facebook’s advertising guidelines are long and complex. Here are some excerpts:

• Ads must not contain false, misleading, fraudulent, or deceptive claims or content.
• You may not use Facebook advertising data for any purpose except on an aggregate and anonymous basis.
• Ads must clearly represent the company, product, service, or brand that is being advertised.
• Ads and sponsored stories in the News Feed may not include images comprised of more than 20% text.

Here’s the thing: you and I have both seen ads that seemingly violate one or more of the advertising guidelines, and yet they got through. Facebook’s advertising gatekeepers are either drastically inconsistent or bad at monitoring, due to the sheer number of ads created every day. Doubtless, large parts of it are automated, but it can’t all be automated or else we’d see more issues with just the automation.

In any case, when you create an ad, that ad is “Approved pending review.” In other words, it needs approval from Facebook’s team before it will show up on the site.

Time to Approve

Facebook claims on their knowledge base article about approval that, on average, ad approval takes around 15 minutes. Some people will have never experienced a delay longer than five. Others have likely seen ads floating in limbo for days at a time. Elsewhere, in the community, Facebook reps have said approval can take up to 24 hours.

Ads are sent to review the moment they are created. The common advice for marketers looking to run limited-time or time-sensitive promotions is to create your ads early. Unfortunately, this can hamper the process of split testing, which you will have to anticipate. Unfortunately, there’s no email you can message or account you can flag in order to get your pending review ad pushed through faster.

There are various rumors about factors that can increase your chances of getting an ad through review. Some marketers claim that increasing ad spend will streamline the process. The theory, of course, being that Facebook is prioritizing advertisers with a lot of money. This sounds like a good theory, except the scale of the problem affects everyone.

When a small business ups their spending from $25 per day to $250 per day, that’s a sizable increase. However, when you realize that companies with literal millions of dollars to spend are also advertising, why would Facebook prioritize a $250 daily ad when they could instead prioritize a $10,000 per day ad?

The reality is that changes like that only refresh the pending queue. Each time you edit an ad, that ad needs to go through the approval process again

Issues With Approval

When your ad is pending approval, if it’s taking a long time, you might be at risk for a denial. Thankfully, Facebook will email you if your ad is denied, including a link to the advertising guidelines and a note about which guideline you have broken.

Possibly one of the most common issues to come across is the 20% text rule It’s a flaky rule and depends more on positioning than it does on actual text coverage.

You can check out examples of good and bad ads for each major category of guidelines on Facebook’s site. It’s actually a very handy resource, and will show you examples of some of the things Facebook is trying to stay away from.

The most common violations tend to be:

• Poor command over the language. Bad spelling, bad grammar, bad punctuation, it’s all under this banner. It’s also the single most left-to-reviewer-discretion guideline in the entire ads program. You’ve surely seen ads with all caps or misspellings, but for every one you see, hundreds are being rejected.
• Cloaked URLs for landing pages – including links to files that aren’t web pages, like PDFs – will earn you a rejection. They can, in extreme instances, also lead to an account termination.
• Inaccurate ad text. Ad reviewers need to learn a bit about your business and product when your ad is under review. They’ll probably even check out your landing page. If your ad turns out to be too different from what you’re actually selling, issues arise.
• Irrelevant images. Sex sells, but on Facebook, it doesn’t sell unless you’re selling whatever the model in question is wearing or doing. You can’t have an ad for a piece of database software and sell it with pictures of Kate Upton.

So how can you make sure your ads are approved?

Bypassing the Review Process

Well, you can’t bypass the review process entirely. You can, however, do what you can to comply with the standards Facebook sets and ensure your ad gets through quickly.

Having an account in good standing is a benefit. If your account has been flagged for ad violations in the past, you’ll struggle with the review process as you’re under more scrutiny.

Edited ads are more likely to be approved than new ads, as long as the edits are minor. Changing targeting, a tweak to copy, etc. Facebook can compare to the old version and see both that the old version was approved and the new version is not much different.

Obviously, you need to comply with prominent ad guidelines, such as the rules for targeting minors with alcohol, tobacco, drug or firearms content. The same goes for geographic restrictions on these products.

Here’s one you might not realize; “you” is a bad word. If your ad mentions the user directly and personally, specifically if it uses individual data, it will be rejected.

Be careful with your copy, choose relevant images, don’t cloak destination links and you should be good to go.