How Real Are Facebook Likes? It Turns Out Not Real At All
Written by Evan SchumanJust about everyone involved in E-Commerce knows deep down that social media “Likes” are not indicative of anything and that even most consumers are not impressed with lots of Likes. But it’s nice to see concrete proof every now and then. And so a report on July 13 was quite interesting. The BBC piece described an experiment where a reporter created an entirely non-existent business, which he called Virtual Bagel, with a tagline “We send you the bagels via the Internet. Just download and enjoy.” The reporter observed, “Seems like nonsense. Surely, nobody is going to be interested in that.”
Well, some 3,318 Facebook Likes later, the BBC found that the Likes were coming overwhelmingly from Malaysia, India, Indonesia and Egypt with almost none from the U.S. and the U.K. “People in certain parts of the world are incredibly keen to click, for no apparent reason, on random” sites such as the bagel “imaginary business,” the BBC report said. When it comes to exposing the absurd claims of social site Likes, I think it’s safe to say I like this BBC report.
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
