After gathering a fair bit of friends and likes organically on Facebook, the mango decided to go for Facebook advertising. The mango wasn’t sure of the right target audience, but decided to start with ladies in the age group of 24 to 30, living in India, in Pune and in Mumbai. Likes started coming in, but as Mango started to drill down on finding and analysing who is being reached, there was a startling revelation.
One of the liker was this didi.
I tried to analyse if she is the right audience by looking at her friends, posts, likes etc. Then I realised something isn’t right. There were 75 more likes that had come in my week long experiment on Facebook advertising. There was one more lady
I tried to analyse her and she also didn’t seem right. Moreover, she had liked almost 800 pages, that’s another point I will highlight in another post. Coming back, she didn’t seem the right audience. Then I did an image search on the both the lovely ladies and here I was shocked with their multiple incarnations on Facebook! Here are some!
There are 140 profiles on Facebook carrying the same photo.
The other girl’s photo also is on over 100 profiles like this below.
I also ran a check on similar images, and found there are multiple and multiple profiles carrying the same photo. Mind you, these are not celebrity pics. I stumbled upon a treasure trove of girl-next-door type pics, which are classified or tagged as Desi Facebook Girl. Pray, what does that mean! Are these girls real, or are they made up pics, where are these pics coming from, is someone making a business out of these pics, why are people setting up so many fake profiles, is something fishy goin on.
While we ponder on these questions, the real worry for the mango was among all these profiles, how to find the right one, to whom only the ad should be shown. There might well be a male handling the female profile. The ads shown to him/her while operating the fake profile still get recorded as impressions in my CPM kitty. Same for if the same person is handling multiple profiles. How to optimise the target audience and the money spent on them?
Or should you say that you want to reach out to ‘an audience’ anyway. The persons handling the fake profiles are also a part of the audience any which way. So not bother about the fake profiles.
Or should you opt to not advertise to young females as those seem to be largest concentration among fake profiles.
On the other hand, does the official figure of 83 million fake profiles as declared by Facebook seem to less, considering my exercise above?