Review: Premium Fans - a company who sell you Facebook fans
A month ago a company called Premium Fans contacted me requesting a sponsored review. As with all my reviews I'm brutally honest and constructive and this is a great subject matter to review.
Premium Fans are a company who you can pay to deliver you Facebook fans; so you nominate a fan-page and unleash them upon it. Their selling point? They pride themselves on delivering real people to your page, not like other competitors who deliver clearly fake accounts. Every person who "likes" your page is very real and done so on an opt-in basis.
So why would you want to do this?
It's pretty awkward having a fan-page with no fans. You're a reputable business and have a solid customer base, however you don't have a fan-page. Therefore you create one, but for a long while it's going to have a low number of fans. No fans means no interaction, therefore it reflects badly on the business.
So how did you review them?
Well, thinking that Seopher.com doesn't actually have a fan-page, the most obvious means of testing out their services was by employing them. So I created a Seopher.com fanpage (linked everywhere across the site now...) and allowed them to run a campaign on it.
Therefore I can accurately see the following metrics:
1. How many fans they deliver
2. How real they are (interaction)
3. How targetted they are (demographics)
4. What the drop-off is like
1. How many fans they deliver
At the end of the campaign there were 2,511 fans of the Facebook page. Considering we agreed ~1,000 they suitably over delivered. Having spoken to a member of their team this is apparently quite normal. It's to accommodate for any potential drop-off and considering their business model is based around an "if we can't get you the fans we promised, you get your money back" philosophy, then it makes sense for them to aim to over-deliver. So they comfortably over-delivered in this aspect.2. How real they are
Again, the fans delivered to the page were real - they have status updates, friends, relationships and pictures.No click-through or interaction?
One of the major issues I encountered was that the users simply weren't interacting with the page. Facebook was reporting more than a thousand impressions on the piece of content but there were zero comments, zero likes and - crucially, practically zero click-throughs.
Proving they could see the posts
I started to believe that maybe these users had "liked" my page, but through some form of wizardry couldn't actually see my posts. So I decided to pose questions to the users directly, to see if I could get any response. For example I asked a fairly open question about "what is the best designed website you use?" - a great invitation for the shameless self promotion bunch to promote their own sites. For 5 days there were no responses at all.
Then I decided to make it as easy as possible: "Facebook fans - like this status if you think I should give away an iPad2 to a random reader next week. It could be you...". 16 people liked this. 16 users from a set of 2500+, which seems low considering a free iPad would be on offer. But at least it proved some users could see the statuses.
This led me onto my next investigation...
3. How targetted they are
Seopher.com has a male dominated demographic - specifically 20-45 males. The Facebook users are 75% female (notably 69% of them being 13-24), which would explain the lack of interaction.
But it wasn't a targetted campaign...
I can't say bad things about the service because they weren't specifically delivering targetted users. This service costs more and obviously takes longer (in fact they have a new start-up specifically targetted at this... more on that later). So the fact that the users are entirely wrong for the demographic isn't because they're unable to do this, it's because they specifically weren't doing that this time around.
I'd like to see a campaign with targetted users
I imagine when their next product comes out, I'll review a targetted campaign to see how my fortunes fair.
4. What the drop-off is like
I've actually not experienced too much drop-off. A couple of hundred at most - the pace seems to be a few each day at the moment, but I assume that'll stabilise.Overall experience
The service was friendly and they will happily explain their methodologies, which is comforting. The things I've learned are:
1) Non-targetted users don't click your links
2) Nor do they like statuses, not even if you promise free expensive things
3) They don't unlike your page much either though
So why would you use PremiumFans if the "fans" don't interact?
Well, a fan-page with 2,000 fans looks a lot more appealing than one with 0 doesn't it? So it's for that reason.
They're selling 1,000 fans for $99.99, whereas 1,000 targetted fans is $169.99. Click here to view their full pricing structure.
New targetted service
They're launching Social Bottle Rocket at the end of the month which is more dedicated towards targetted services. They'll be looking to deliver both Facebook and Twitter fans/followers, along with branding for your Facebook page and Twitter account - so essentially allowing you to get straight up and running. This will be a lot more expensive but, they assure me, highly targetted towards users in your demographic.
Overall I feel it's a decent service, although only time will tell. If 100% of these users drop-off in the coming weeks then the whole experience is for nothing. If they remain (which it looks like they will), then it's a welcome boost to any fan-page, even if it is somewhat artificial. I'm looking forward to trying a more targetted service soon.
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