Howdy everybody, I keep seeing so many threads here, where people ask for advice on facebook marketing or where others brag about how they are generating 500+ likes per dollar. I was in a similar position a few months ago, where I didn't know much about fb ads and picked up informations here and there. Today I've decided to share my experience so that others can learn from my "mistakes". This is going to be a longer post, so if you were looking for a three liner I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I promise if you keep reading it's going to be worth your five minutes of time. But if you're still looking for a quick advice, here is it: Don't buy facebook ads for pages. A few words to the back story. In March 2013 I've launched a funny picture site http://epicpix.com/. and a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/epicpixcom - nothing special, basically a 9gag clone (even tho I had the idea years before 9gag existed, I'm running websites since 2003, but never got my ass up to start the website earlier - which was a mistake, but that's life). Through my other websites and my network of webmaster buddies I've been able to push 30k/day on that site with no big issues, but the number of fb fans, never exceeded 300. With those 300 fans (which I acquired through a fb tool on the website and through friends etc) I was able to reach easily 1000 views per post - my posts were getting 10-30 likes each, with a good amount of share etc. Everything was going "ok". But obviously I wanted more and thought, hell if it's going so well with 300 fans, how is it going to go with 3000, or 15.000. So I did some research (not enough) on facebook ads and started to run highly targeted ads, with a/b test, testing different wording, images etc. All the stuff you should do in order to have a successful fb campaign. First I was targeting cheap countries so that I would gain a lot of likes for no money and once I switch to high quality countries like US/CAN/UK, I would have a solid base user group and the new users would think that I had a somewhat big and active page going on. Well this turned out to be a mistake on the one hand and not so bad on the other. Why was it bad? Well because users don't give a f*ck if your site got 100 likes or 1000, they are either going to like your page or not (a lot of users here tend to say the difference and tell you to get cheap likes first - that's stupid) But why wasn't it THAT bad in the end? Well that's simple. Because no matter if you target US folks, or people from India you end up getting "fake" accounts anyway - just more expensive ones if you target US traffic. You might ask why? Well that's because around ~85% (to my experience) of people who like ads to fb pages, are working for those companies located in 3rd tier countries, which sells you likes in bulk - you know these sites, or gigs on fiverrr - 1000 likes for $10 bucks or stuff like that. But why would these users like your page, even tho you didn't pay them? Well to hide their "accounts" from the automatic facebook fraud detection. If they would only like pages from people who paid for it, facebook would have an easy time to filter them. But if they simply like EVERYTHING, from various locations (VPN) they are much, much harder to track down. The people who liked my page, also like 200.000 different pages and didn't follow any logic. They liked Pepsi and Cola, the Democrats and the Republicans. So my site ended up having 15.000 likes, due to my good targeting I was only paying around $1 / 100 likes on 3rd tier countries on a $7-10 / 100 likes on US traffic. But like I already mentioned, the users were fake/bad from both sources. Now there's another issue. Those 15.000 inactive "fans" you bought from facebook from your hard earned cash, are now going to ruin your page even more. Because if you release a post on your fb page, fb shows this posts to a small percentage of your fans, if they like/interact with it, it gets distributed to more fans, if they don't it gets buried and the rest of your fans are never going to see it - UNLESS you pay facebook AGAIN, by promoting your post to your inactive, fake fans. This cluster f*ck caused my epicpix fb page to almost die completely. The number of likes/shares was getting worse and worse (content was basically the same quality all time) and now I have 15.000 fans, with 20 people talking about - which is bonkers. But this is exactly the discrepancy you gonna see on most of the fb pages, people are telling you about here, when they're on a $1/500 likes spree. (The number is artificially increased during the time you're running campaigns, because "new likes" count toward the "talking about" number, even tho, they never do anything else than to like your page once and never come back or like another post ever again. I hope at least a few people read the full post and are now more aware about the issues, they're going to face when trying to promote their page via fb ads. I wrote an article about this facebook marketing http://1ksociety.com/2014/03/27/facebook-marketing-1-on-1/ "phenomenon" on my website: http://1ksociety.com/ I'm open to hear about ideas on how to get "active" fb fans to like your site. I'd love to increase the number of my fans for my new page: http://www.facebook.com/1ksociety - but I'm way too afraid to use fb ads again. The obvious choices are to contact other bigger fb pages in the same niche as yours, but it's very hard to get them to work with you, if you can't offer them much in return (I even offered money, but didn't even get a reply). Using groups is probably the best try, but I haven't dug too much into that topic, this is going to be the next thing I try. Anyway, thanks for reading and please let me know if you have any ideas regarding this issue!