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The United States Spent $630k Buying Likes for These Pro-America Facebook Pages

Is America really going to win over the minds of its opponents by buying exposure for pictures of beaches?

Is Facebook the key to furthering American interests abroad? A relatively obscure State Department bureau thinks so, having spent $630,000 since 2011 on growing four pro-America Facebook pages that are aimed at pushing State Department priorities—democracy, innovation, how great America is—to worldwide users.

According to a report by the State Department Inspector General, the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), which is tasked with developing some of State's presence online, used a pair of internal campaigns in 2011 and 2012—which relied heavily on buying Facebook advertising—to increase the number of likes on four themed Facebook pages from around 100,000 to over 2 million each. The report also notes that IIP's foreign language pages had all grown to more than 450,000 fans by March 2013.

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The four pages are little more than vanilla online versions of tourist pamphlets. The latest post on eJournal USA asked users if they've ever heard of fusion food, while Innovation Generation shared a picture of neon headphones and asks users how their brand will differentiate itself from others. Global Conversations: Our Planet appears to focus on the environment, and Democracy Challenge bills itself as a "global conversation moderated by the United States Department of State."

Despite the growth, the exact point and usefulness of the pages is unclear. As the Inspector General report states, within the bureau, the debate appears to be whether or not likes lead to engagement. As the report states, some say that many people who like a picture or an ad don't end up actually engaging with content; others argue that Facebook advertising is needed because it's really hard to find the IIP pages on Facebook.

From my own experience, this latter point is correct, as the pages were pretty difficult to find. But I'd blame it less on Facebook's search and more on IIP's totally bland naming and complete lack of a link to any of the pages on their State Department sites. Instead, you have to find them buried in a sidebar on the IIP Digital site, which is part of the US embassy network. And "eJournal USA"? What does that even mean?

The report specifically hits on low engagement, stating:

IIP’s four global thematic English-language Facebook pages had garnered more than 2.5 million fans each by mid-March 2013; the number actually engaging with each page was considerably smaller, with just over 2 percent “liking,” sharing, or commenting on any item within the previous week. Engagement on each posting varied, and most of that interaction was in the form of “likes.” Many postings had fewer than 100 comments or shares; the most popular ones had several hundred.

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Humorously, the report also calls out the IIP's Persian-language Facebook page, Vision of America, for having poor engagement in its target market of Iran. Although it has than 400,000 likes, mostly garnered through ads, the report states that less than 1 percent of those fans even live in Iran, where Facebook ads are banned. A similar site by the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, USAdarFarsi, has only 135,000 likes, but reportedly half of them live in Iran.

This is pretty creepy, isn't it?

Curiously, the IIP's Persian site only focuses on "soft" policy topics—as shown by its English-language sites above. As Michal Conger at the Washington Examiner points out, the Inspector General report states that IIP analysts found that serious policy topics lowered engagement, largely because the type of young Facebook users that like random pictures of tacos probably don't give much of a shit about geopolitics.

So what is even the point? $630,000 is admittedly a small chunk of change from the State Department's budget, which was over $55 billion in 2012. Still, it's hard to see how a bunch of soft-ass Facebook posts about how great America is—without even really hitting on that very well—is going to advance State Department's policy goals. I mean, is America really going to win over the minds of its opponents by buying exposure for pictures of beaches?

The Inspector General recommends the IIP, and State Department as a whole, reassess its social media policy to have more clear goals. What's obvious is that the usual social media metric—more likes! more followers!—is useless, especially when you rely on ads and mindless posts to win likes. Growing true engagement means sharing things that users find valuable enough to keep coming back, and the State Department could do well by fostering serious discussion in the social media sphere. But, for the love of god, it needs to give up like-whoring with pictures of tacos.

@derektmead