I did look at the Insights reports, that is where I first got the feeling something was wrong. The demographics of the profiles that liked our page were very different from those that clicked on ads or left email addresses or expressed interest in f2f customer conversations, even though the basic value prop was similar. To be specific, they look suspiciously like the general population distribution of Facebook, not like our target demographics.

From our research, the target demographics for mobile apps that make you happier are 1) moms if it is easy and reduces fear/stress, 2) middle aged women if it gives insight and helps them connect with already close friends and 3) men and working moms if it just tells them what to do. In our generic ad tests of those concepts, the affinities showed up in much higher CTRs for those segments than for others, just like we expected (as much as 3-4X higher in the case of segment #1).

However, when we looked at our Insights data, the population of fans looked much more like the general population of people on Facebook…in fact, there seemed to be slightly more young people in general and especially more young men than average, which was certainly not expected. I’m tempted to create pages for feminine hygiene products and painless prostate exams and see what happens…;)

This observation seems to be true across the countries we tested (Philippines, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and USA), though we didn’t really get enough data for Ireland and USA to be sure.

At first that made me sure that the booklicants were just bots, as if someone copied a batch of profiles and turned them into robots, and when they did it they took a slice of people on Facebook at that point in time (say a year ago) which would have looked pretty close to the population on FB today but with a slightly younger bias.

However, I am less sure they are fake now. For one thing, obsessively liking stuff may be a behavior that some people have regardless of age and gender…who knows why they might do it. More importantly, 1) FB would easily be able to find and kill fakes given their near perfect information and 2) FB would probably have replied more quickly to my repeated attempts to get a refund if they actually knew what to do about it. As it is, after several well documented emails and a carefully written blog posting I still have ZERO response from them. We’re not doing more advertising spend on FB until we hear back.

Have you looked into your Facebook insights to see if there’s a demographic theme of these first users (i.e. all from a certain country etc)

Would love to learn more about it

That sounds really cool – thanks for sharing. Out of interest, why did you decide not to collect email addresses to access the ebook?

Working on the Twitter follower program soon – will keep you posted

You can get it for free here: http://www.madintelligence.com/financial-modelling-question-page/

Great post, really enjoyed the short video. Looking forward to viewing your webinar on gaining twitter followers.

Rob