I started a Facebook page for my comics back in April... To build an audience, my friend recommended I advertise internationally. I immediately started gaining likes... the majority of them coming from the Middle East (Pakistan, Egypt).
However, I soon noticed several paradoxical things:
Fan base and comments
I would gain hundreds of likes to my page or promoted post, but the people who liked seemed to have "bot-ish" profiles- ex: names like "Gemini Queen", "Lovely Guru", Pinky Angel", etc. And their comments were equally as eyebrow-raising... often times pure gibberish or advertisements...
Liking/disliking trends
I've reached around 51k fans, 30% of them Middle Eastern. It seems at this point that there would be a higher virality of page likes (intuitively, if more people know about my page, they're more likely to share it with their friends... thus increasing virality)... but instead each week there's counterintuitive fluctuations of likes and dislikes.
Post propagation:
When I used to just post images onto my page, it'd get a decent % of pre-promotion reach (meaning, it'd reach a good amount of my fans before having to pay). But I recently just finished my own comics website and want to drive traffic there. So, instead of sharing the image, I'll share a link to that comic on my page. I noticed that Facebook seems unwilling to share that kind of post with people unless I pay more.
I'm wondering if someone can explain the way Facebook works. It seems ever since they've gone public there has been a lot of "sketchiness" going on. If these "fans" are bots, what's in it for the bot creators? I'm not paying them for anything, I'm paying Facebook... so where's the incentive to spam nonsense in the first place?
This article also provided some interesting insight on this, but never really answered my questions: http://www.fetzervalves.com/post/33503162498/facebook-promoted-posts-foreign-likes