How a "Promote a post" campaign to get participants in our survey resulted in unsolicited "Likes" for our page. In other words how Facebook helped me waste my money.

1. The mysterious history of 900 Facebook-likes …
Conclusion: 90% of my money spent on
Facebook promotional tools was wasted.

2. 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.

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

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

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

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

10. 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”.

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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.

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

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

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

17. 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.

18. 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.

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

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

21. 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

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