Advertising campaigns for raising the number of Facebook fans cost the US State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) $630,000, according to a report which also suggests the PR game was likely not worth the effort.
Each of the four English language Facebook pages hosted by the
Bureau of International Information Programs saw their number of
fans skyrocket from 100,000 to over two million people over a two
year period.
The 7 digit ‘likes’ figures are due to two expensive 2011 and
2012 advertising campaigns, concludes the Inspector General’s (IG) report, which was issued in
May and has recently appeared online.
The Bureau’s foreign language pages have also seen their fan
numbers multiply, rising from 68,000 to more than 450,000.
Not everyone is impressed by the figures, however. “Many in
the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as ‘buying fans’
who may have once clicked on an ad or ‘liked’ a photo but have no
real interest in the topic and have never engaged further,”
the report reads.
The IG office spent a week on monitoring the Bureau’s Facebook
activity to find out only two percent of their “fans” fell under
the category of engaged audience – liking, sharing and commenting
on the IIP page’s content.
The lack of truly engaged fans presents a separate problem under
new Facebook rules starting from September 2012, which state that
one has to actively interact with the “liked” page in order for
it to appear in their news feed.
“This change sharply reduced the value of having large numbers
of marginally interested fans and means that IIP must continually
spend money on sponsored story ads or else its ‘reach’ statistics
will plummet,” the IG report says, urging the Bureau to cut
advertising spending and make it more targeted, finding “the
right balance between youth and elite audience engagement”.
The pitfalls of opting to invest in ‘likes’ regardless of whom
rather than seeking out a more loyal audience comes particularly
into focus when viewing the US State Department bureau’s dealings
with its online Iranian audience.
The Vision of America page in Farsi, run by the Bureau of
International Information Programs, has gained over 420,000 fans.
However, only one percent of those people live in Iran, where
there is no Facebook advertising anyway.
Another page, USAdarFarsi, run by the Bureau of Near Eastern
Affairs, has an audience of some 130,000, but the content it
supplies results in half of its page fans actually being
Iranians.
That the department has two overlapping Persian language pages at
all is another issue raised by the IG report.