Hacking The Case Interview

Hacking the Case Interview

Meta case interviews

If you’re interviewing for a business or product strategy role at Meta (Facebook), there is a good chance that you’ll receive at least one case study interview, which is also known as a case interview. Meta roles that include case study interviews as part of the interview process include:

  • Business Development
  • Product Manager
  • Product Marketing
  • Product Strategy
  • Strategy and Operations

To land a job offer for these roles at Meta, you’ll need to ace every single one of your case interviews. While Meta case study interviews may seem ambiguous and challenging at first, know that they can be mastered with proper preparation.

If you are preparing for an upcoming Meta case study interview, we have you covered. In this comprehensive Meta case interview guide, we’ll cover:

  • What is a Meta case study interview
  • Why Meta uses case study interviews
  • The 6 steps to ace any Meta case study interview
  • Meta case study interview examples and answers
  • Meta case study interview tips
  • Recommended Meta case interview resources

If you’re looking for a step-by-step shortcut to learn case interviews quickly, enroll in our case interview course . These insider strategies from a former Bain interviewer helped 30,000+ land tech and consulting offers while saving hundreds of hours of prep time.

What is a Meta Case Study Interview?

Meta case study interviews, also known as Meta case interviews, are 20- to 30-minute exercises in which you are placed in a hypothetical business situation and are asked to find a solution or make a recommendation.

First, you’ll create a framework that shows the approach you would take to solve the case. Then, you’ll collaborate with the interviewer, answering a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions that will give you the information and data needed to develop an answer. Finally, you’ll deliver your recommendation at the end of the case.

Case study interviews have traditionally been used by consulting firms to assess a candidate’s potential to become a successful consultant. However, now a days, many companies with ex-consultants use case studies to assess a candidate’s capabilities. Since Meta has so many former consultants in its business roles, you’ll likely encounter at least one case study interview.

The business problems that you’ll be given in a Meta case study interview will likely be real challenges that Meta faces today:

  • Usage of Facebook has dropped by nearly 15% over the past year. What is causing this and what can Meta do to address this?
  • How can Meta increase ad revenues from its B2B customers?
  • How should Meta deal with “fake news” in users’ newsfeeds?
  • How can Meta increase user engagement despite the rise in new social media platforms such as Tik Tok?

Depending on what team at Meta you are interviewing for, you may be given a business problem that is relevant to that specific team.

Although there is a wide range of business problems you could possibly be given in your Meta case interview, the fundamental case interview strategies to solve each problem is the same. If you learn the right strategies and get enough practice, you’ll be able to solve any Meta case study interview.

Why does Meta Use Case Study Interviews?

Meta uses case study interviews because your performance in a case study interview is a measure of how well you would do on the job. Meta case interviews assess a variety of different capabilities and qualities needed to successfully complete job duties and responsibilities.

Meta's case study interviews primarily assess five things:

  • Logical, structured thinking : Can you structure complex problems in a clear, simple way?
  • Analytical problem solving : Can you read, interpret, and analyze data well?
  • Business acumen : Do you have sound business judgment and intuition?
  • Communication skills : Can you communicate clearly, concisely, and articulately?
  • Personality and cultural fit : Are you coachable and easy to work with?

Since all of these qualities can be assessed in just a 20- to 30-minute case, Meta case study interviews are an effective way to assess a candidate’s capabilities.

The 6 Steps to Solve Any Meta Case Study Interview

In general, there are six steps to solve any Meta case study interview.

1. Understand the case

Your Meta case interview will begin with the interviewer giving you the case background information. While the interviewer is speaking, make sure that you are taking meticulous notes on the most important pieces of information. Focus on understanding the context of the situation and the objective of the case.

Don’t be afraid to ask clarifying questions if you do not understand something. You may want to summarize the case background information back to the interviewer to confirm your understanding of the case.

The most important part of this step is to verify the objective of the case. Not answering the right business question is the quickest way to fail a case interview.

2. Structure the problem

The next step is to develop a framework to help you solve the case. A framework is a tool that helps you structure and break down complex problems into smaller, more manageable components. Another way to think about frameworks is brainstorming different ideas and organizing them into different categories.

For a complete guide on how to create tailored and unique frameworks for each case, check out our article on case interview frameworks .

Before you start developing your framework, it is completely acceptable to ask the interviewer for a few minutes so that you can collect your thoughts and think about the problem.

Once you have identified the major issues or areas that you need to explore, walk the interviewer through your framework. They may ask a few questions or provide some feedback.

3. Kick off the case

Once you have finished presenting your framework, you’ll start diving into different areas of your framework to begin solving the case. How this process will start depends on whether the case interview is candidate-led or interviewer-led.

If the case interview is a candidate-led case, you’ll be expected to propose what area of your framework to start investigating. So, propose an area and provide a reason for why you want to start with that area. There is generally no right or wrong area of your framework to pick first.

If the case interview is interviewer-led, the interviewer will tell you what area of the framework to start in or directly give you a question to answer.

4. Solve quantitative problems

Meta case study interviews may have some quantitative aspect to them. For example, you may be asked to calculate a certain profitability or financial metric. You could also be asked to estimate the size of a particular market or to estimate a particular figure.

The key to solving quantitative problems is to lay out a structure or approach upfront with the interviewer before doing any math calculations. If you lay out and present your structure to solve the quantitative problem and the interviewer approves of it, the rest of the problem is just simple execution of math.

5. Answer qualitative questions

Meta case study interviews may also have qualitative aspects to them. You may be asked to brainstorm a list of potential ideas. You could also be asked to provide your opinion on a business issue or situation.

The key to answering qualitative questions is to structure your answer. When brainstorming a list of ideas, develop a structure to help you neatly categorize all of your ideas. When giving your opinion on a business issue or situation, provide a summary of your stance or position and then enumerate the reasons that support it.

6. Deliver a recommendation

In the last step of the Meta case interview, you’ll present your recommendation and provide the major reasons that support it. You do not need to recap everything that you have done in the case, so focus on only summarizing the facts that are most important.

It is also good practice to include potential next steps that you would take if you had more time or data. These can be areas of your framework that you did not have time to explore or lingering questions that you do not have great answers for.

Meta Case Study Interview Examples and Answers

Example #1 : What are some areas that Meta should invest in?

Sample solution: To answer this question, it may be helpful to clarify what Meta's primary objective is. Are they looking to increase profits, revenues, number of users, or user engagement? The ideas that you brainstorm may vary depending on their actual goals.

Next, develop a framework to organize your ideas. You may want to think about areas of investments as short-term investments and long-term investments. You could brainstorm short-term investments and long-term investments for each of Meta's growth objectives.

Example #2 : Should Meta enter the job search platform market?

Sample solution: This is a market entry case. Potential areas you should consider looking into in your framework include: the attractiveness of the job search platform market, the competitive landscape, Meta's capabilities, and the expected profitability from entering the market.

Example #3 : Facebook Groups has seen a 15% drop in usage over the past year. How would you determine what is causing this drop?

Sample solution: You can break down usage by the number of users and the average level of engagement per user. This can be the first major area of your framework, determining the exact quantitative driver behind the drop in usage. Once you understand whether the issue is due to a decline in the number of users or a decline in engagement, you can try to understand qualitatively why this happening.

You could look into potential areas such as whether customer needs or preferences have changed, whether competitors have made any strategic moves, whether Meta has made any recent changes to its platform, or whether there are new market trends affecting Facebook Groups.

Example #4 : How would you estimate how many birthday posts occur on Facebook in a given day?

Sample solution: This is an estimation question. Before you do any math calculations, make sure to lay out a structure or approach on how you would calculate this figure.

You may want to start by estimating the number of people that use Facebook and divide that by 365 to determine the number of people that have a birthday on any given day. Then, estimate the average number of friends a person has on Facebook and the percentage of friends that would make a birthday post. Multiplying these figures together will give you an estimate of the number of birthday posts on Facebook in a given day.

Example #5 : How would you sell Meta advertising to a potential client?

Sample solution: To develop an effective marketing strategy, you may want to look into the client’s needs, competitor offerings, and Meta advertising’s features or benefits. Exploring these three areas will help you identify the features or benefits of Facebook advertising that are superior to competitor products that the client also values.

Example #6 : How can Meta better compete in the ads market?

Sample solution: When thinking of ways for Meta to better compete in the ads market, we can consider all of the stakeholders involved in Meta's business to come up with a comprehensive list of ideas. The major stakeholders are Meta's users and advertisers.

Therefore, Meta can make its platform a better user experience for its users and advertisers. For users, they want ads that are relevant, safe, and trustworthy. For advertisers, they want to run ads with high targeting specificity, low cost, and easy setup and maintenance.

Example #7 : How would you identify potential partners for Meta to work with?

Sample solution: The first step in solving this case is to identify what Meta's objective or goal is with a potential partnership. Are they trying to acquire new users? Or are they trying to increase user engagement?

Next, you can come up with a framework to assess the attractiveness of a partnership with a particular company. You may want to look into areas such as the partner’s capabilities, expected synergies, and expected profitability.

Example #8 : What are Meta's challenges in their international markets?

Sample solution: When answering this question, consider what are the major types of differences between the United States and other countries. Create a framework that shows the most important characteristics or qualities of international markets. One potential framework may look into customer needs and preferences, the competitive landscape, market trends, and Meta's capabilities to execute in international markets.

Example #9 : How would you balance content from the different number of platforms on Facebook?

Sample solution: To balance content, it is helpful to first create a framework that assesses the ideal qualities or characteristics that good content has. You may want to assess the content’s level of engagement, the content’s trust and safety, and the likelihood that the content will not drive users away from Facebook and onto other platforms.

You can use this framework to assess each piece of content across all of the platforms on Facebook to determine which content is best to show. It may be beneficial to also diversify the platforms that content is pulled from so that users do not grow too attached to a particular platform outside of Facebook.

Example #10 : Let’s say that Meta is considering getting into the ride share business. What should they consider when making the decision on whether or not to enter?

Sample solution: This is a market entry case and the approach is similar to Example #2. Potential areas you should consider looking into in your framework include: the attractiveness of the ride share market, the competitive landscape, the company’s capabilities, and the expected profitability.

Meta Case Study Interview Tips

Below are eight of our best tips to help you perform your best during your Meta case study interview.

1. Familiarize yourself with Meta's business model

If you don’t understand Meta's business model, it will be challenging for you to do well in their case interviews. Therefore, you should know that Meta makes the majority of its revenue by selling advertising. You should also be familiar with the products and services that Meta offers for the specific team you are interviewing for.

2. Read recent news articles on Meta

A lot of the times, the cases you’ll see in a Meta case study interview are real business issues that the company faces. Reading up on the latest Meta news will give you a sense of what Meta's biggest challenges are and what major business decisions they face today. There is a good chance that your case study interview will be similar to something that you have read in the news.

3. Verify the objective of the case 

Answering the wrong business problem will waste a lot of time during your Meta case study interview. Therefore, the most critical step of the case interview is to verify the objective of the case with the interviewer. Make sure that you understand what the primary business issue is and what overall question you are expected to answer at the end of the case.

4. Ask clarifying questions

Do not be afraid to ask questions. You will not be penalized for asking questions that are important and relevant to the case. 

Great questions to ask include asking for the definition of an unfamiliar term, asking questions that clarify the objective of the issue, and asking questions to strengthen your understanding of the business situation.

5. Do not use memorized frameworks

Interviewers can tell when you are using memorized frameworks from popular case interview prep books. Meta values creativity and intellect. Therefore, make every effort to create a custom, tailored framework for each case that you get.

6. Always connect your answers to the case objective

Throughout the case, make sure you are connecting each of your answers back to the overall business problem or question. What implications does your answer have on the overall business problem?

Many candidates make the mistake of answering case questions correctly, but they don’t take the initiative to tie their answer back to the case objective.

7. Communicate clearly and concisely

In a Meta case study interview, it can be tempting to answer the interviewer’s question and then continue talking about related topics or ideas. However, you have a limited amount of time to solve a Meta case, so it is best to keep your answers concise and to the point.

Answer the interviewer’s question, summarize how it impacts the case objective, and then move onto the next important issue or question.

8. Be enthusiastic

Meta wants to hire candidates that love their job and will work hard. Displaying enthusiasm shows that you are passionate about working at Meta. Having a high level of enthusiasm and energy also makes the interview more enjoyable for the interviewer. They will be more likely to have a positive impression of you.

Recommended Meta Case Interview Resources

Here are the resources we recommend to learn the most robust, effective case interview strategies in the least time-consuming way:

  • Comprehensive Case Interview Course (our #1 recommendation): The only resource you need. Whether you have no business background, rusty math skills, or are short on time, this step-by-step course will transform you into a top 1% caser that lands multiple consulting offers.
  • Hacking the Case Interview Book   (available on Amazon): Perfect for beginners that are short on time. Transform yourself from a stressed-out case interview newbie to a confident intermediate in under a week. Some readers finish this book in a day and can already tackle tough cases.
  • The Ultimate Case Interview Workbook (available on Amazon): Perfect for intermediates struggling with frameworks, case math, or generating business insights. No need to find a case partner – these drills, practice problems, and full-length cases can all be done by yourself.
  • Case Interview Coaching : Personalized, one-on-one coaching with former consulting interviewers
  • Behavioral & Fit Interview Course : Be prepared for 98% of behavioral and fit questions in just a few hours. We'll teach you exactly how to draft answers that will impress your interviewer
  • Resume Review & Editing : Transform your resume into one that will get you multiple interviews

Land Multiple Tech and Consulting Offers

Complete, step-by-step case interview course. 30,000+ happy customers.

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Facebook: Hard Questions (A)

In April 2018, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to Capitol Hill to be the star witness at congressional hearings intended to examine Facebook’s “breaches of trust” with its users and “larger questions about the fundamental relationship tech companies have with their users.” Zuckerberg admitted that his company faced “a number of important issues around privacy, safety, and democracy” but emphasized that his company was “idealistic and optimistic…focused on all the good that connecting people can bring.”

This ethics case (A) explores some of the issues Facebook has faced since 2014, the criticism it has come under, and its responses. These issues include the “emotional contagion experiment;” privacy issues; fake news; Russian interference in US elections; the “Cambridge Analytica” scandal; charges of bias through targeted ads; and accusations of liberal bias and censorship. The second part of the case (B) then describes some of Facebook’s policy responses to these issues, including tweaking the algorithm; developing and deploying new AI tools; changing its mission; and communicating with the public.

Also see:  ETH15-B: Facebook: Hard Questions (B )

Learning Objective

The case can be used for two purposes.

In classes on business ethics, the case can be used to analyze role of moral intuitions in determining how stakeholders respond to a company’s policies. It also can be used to highlight the fact that a company’s executives and employees often fail to anticipate these stakeholder reactions.

In classes on strategy beyond markets or business and society, the case can be used to analyze companies’ strategic reactions to issues like privacy, data security, fake news, and politicization of a company’s platform. These reactions can take a variety of forms, ranging from public relations and lobbying efforts to self-regulation and rethinking the company’s products and policies.

facebook case study questions

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100 Best Case Study Questions for Your Next Customer Spotlight

Brittany Fuller

Published: November 29, 2022

Case studies and testimonials are helpful to have in your arsenal. But to build an effective library, you need to ask the right case study questions. You also need to know how to write a case study .

marketing team coming up with case study questions

Case studies are customers' stories that your sales team can use to share relevant content with prospects . Not only that, but case studies help you earn a prospect's trust, show them what life would be like as your customer, and validate that your product or service works for your clients.

Before you start building your library of case studies, check out our list of 100 case study questions to ask your clients. With this helpful guide, you'll have the know-how to build your narrative using the " Problem-Agitate-Solve " Method.

Download Now: 3 Free Case Study Templates

What makes a good case study questionnaire?

The ultimate list of case study questions, how to ask your customer for a case study, creating an effective case study.

Certain key elements make up a good case study questionnaire.

A questionnaire should never feel like an interrogation. Instead, aim to structure your case study questions like a conversation. Some of the essential things that your questionnaire should cover include:

  • The problem faced by the client before choosing your organization.
  • Why they chose your company.
  • How your product solved the problem clients faced.
  • The measurable results of the service provided.
  • Data and metrics that prove the success of your service or product, if possible.

You can adapt these considerations based on how your customers use your product and the specific answers or quotes that you want to receive.

What makes a good case study question?

A good case study question delivers a powerful message to leads in the decision stage of your prospective buyer's journey.

Since your client has agreed to participate in a case study, they're likely enthusiastic about the service you provide. Thus, a good case study question hands the reins over to the client and opens a conversation.

Try asking open-ended questions to encourage your client to talk about the excellent service or product you provide.

Free Case Study Templates

Tell us about yourself to access the templates..

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Categories for the Best Case Study Questions

  • Case study questions about the customer's business
  • Case study questions about the environment before the purchase
  • Case study questions about the decision process
  • Case study questions about the customer's business case
  • Case study questions about the buying team and internal advocates
  • Case study questions about customer success
  • Case study questions about product feedback
  • Case study questions about willingness to make referrals
  • Case study question to prompt quote-worthy feedback
  • Case study questions about the customers' future goals

facebook case study questions

Showcase your company's success using these three free case study templates.

  • Data-Driven Case Study Template
  • Product-Specific Case Study Template
  • General Case Study Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Case Study Interview Questions About the Customer's Business

Knowing the customer's business is an excellent way of setting the tone for a case study.

Use these questions to get some background information about the company and its business goals. This information can be used to introduce the business at the beginning of the case study — plus, future prospects might resonate with their stories and become leads for you.

  • Would you give me a quick overview of [company]? This is an opportunity for the client to describe their business in their own words. You'll get useful background information and it's an easy prompt to get the client talking.
  • Can you describe your role? This will give you a better idea of the responsibilities they are subject to.
  • How do your role and team fit into the company and its goals? Knowing how the team functions to achieve company goals will help you formulate how your solution involves all stakeholders.
  • How long has your company been in business? Getting this information will help the reader gauge if pain points are specific to a startup or new company vs. a veteran company.
  • How many employees do you have? Another great descriptor for readers to have. They can compare the featured company size with their own.
  • Is your company revenue available? If so, what is it? This will give your readers background information on the featured company's gross sales.
  • Who is your target customer? Knowing who the target audience is will help you provide a better overview of their market for your case study readers.
  • How does our product help your team or company achieve its objectives? This is one of the most important questions because it is the basis of the case study. Get specifics on how your product provided a solution for your client. You want to be able to say "X company implemented our solution and achieved Y. "
  • How are our companies aligned (mission, strategy, culture, etc.)? If any attributes of your company's mission or culture appealed to the client, call it out.

How many people are on your team? What are their roles? This will help describe key players within the organization and their impact on the implementation of your solution.

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Case Study Interview Questions About the Environment Before the Purchase

A good case study is designed to build trust. Ask clients to describe the tools and processes they used before your product or service. These kinds of case study questions will highlight the business' need they had to fulfill and appeal to future clients.

  • What was your team's process prior to using our product? This will give the reader a baseline to compare the results for your company's product.
  • Were there any costs associated with the process prior to using our product? Was it more expensive? Was it worth the cost? How did the product affect the client's bottom line? This will be a useful metric to disclose if your company saved the client money or was more cost-efficient.
  • What were the major pain points of your process prior to using our product? Describe these obstacles in detail. You want the reader to get as much information on the problem as possible as it sets up the reasoning for why your company's solution was implemented.
  • Did our product replace a similar tool or is this the first time your team is using a product like this? Were they using a similar product? If so, having this information may give readers a reason to choose your brand over the competition.
  • What other challenges were you and your team experiencing prior to using our product? The more details you can give readers regarding the client's struggles, the better. You want to paint a full picture of the challenges the client faced and how your company resolved them.
  • Were there any concerns about how your customers would be impacted by using our product? Getting answers to this question will illustrate to readers the client's concerns about switching to your service. Your readers may have similar concerns and reading how your client worked through this process will be helpful.
  • Why didn't you buy our product or a similar product earlier? Have the client describe any hesitations they had using your product. Their concerns may be relatable to potential leads.
  • Were there any "dealbreakers" involved in your decision to become a customer? Describing how your company was able to provide a solution that worked within those parameters demonstrates how accommodating your brand is and how you put the customer first. It's also great to illustrate any unique challenges the client had. This better explains their situation to the reader.
  • Did you have to make any changes you weren't anticipating once you became a customer? Readers of your case study can learn how switching to your product came with some unexpected changes (good or bad) and how they navigated them. If you helped your client with troubleshooting, ask them to explain that here.

How has your perception of the product changed since you've become a customer? Get the interviewee to describe how your product changed how they do business. This includes how your product accomplished what they previously thought was impossible.

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Case Study Interview Questions About the Decision Process

Readers of the case study will be interested in which factors influenced the decision-making process for the client. If they can relate to that process, there's a bigger chance they'll buy your product.

The answers to these questions will help potential customers through their decision-making process.

  • How did you hear about our product? If the client chose to work with you based on a recommendation or another positive case study, include that. It will demonstrate that you are a trusted brand with an established reputation for delivering results.
  • How long had you been looking for a solution to this problem? This will add to the reader's understanding of how these particular challenges impacted the company before choosing your product.
  • Were you comparing alternative solutions? Which ones? This will demonstrate to readers that the client explored other options before choosing your company.
  • Would you describe a few of the reasons you decided to buy our product? Ask the interviewee to describe why they chose your product over the competition and any benefits your company offered that made you stand out.
  • What were the criteria you used when deciding to buy our product? This will give readers more background insight into the factors that impacted their decision-making process.
  • Were there any high-level initiatives or goals that prompted the decision to buy? For example, was this decision motivated by a company-wide vision? Prompt your clients to discuss what lead to the decision to work with you and how you're the obvious choice.
  • What was the buying process like? Did you notice anything exceptional or any points of friction? This is an opportunity for the client to comment on how seamless and easy you make the buying process. Get them to describe what went well from start to finish.
  • How would you have changed the buying process, if at all? This is an opportunity for you to fine-tune your process to accommodate future buyers.
  • Who on your team was involved in the buying process? This will give readers more background on the key players involved from executives to project managers. With this information, readers can see who they may potentially need to involve in the decision-making process on their teams.

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Case Study Interview Questions About the Customer's Business Case

Your case study questions should ask about your product or solution's impact on the customer's employees, teams, metrics, and goals. These questions allow the client to praise the value of your service and tell others exactly what benefits they derived from it.

When readers review your product or service's impact on the client, it enforces the belief that the case study is credible.

  • How long have you been using our product? This will help readers gauge how long it took to see results and your overall satisfaction with the product or service.
  • How many different people at your company use our product? This will help readers gauge how they can adapt the product to their teams if similar in size.
  • Are there multiple departments or teams using our product? This will demonstrate how great of an impact your product has made across departments.
  • How do you and your team currently use the product? What types of goals or tasks are you using the product to accomplish? Get specifics on how the product actively helps the client achieve their goals.
  • If other teams or departments are using our product, do you know how they're using it? With this information, leads can picture how they can use your product across their teams and how it may improve their workflow and metrics.
  • What was the most obvious advantage you felt our product offered during the sales process? The interviewee should explain the benefits they've gained from using your product or service. This is important for convincing other leads you are better than the competition.
  • Were there any other advantages you discovered after using the product more regularly? Your interviewee may have experienced some additional benefits from using your product. Have them describe in detail what these advantages are and how they've helped the company improve.
  • Are there any metrics or KPIs you track with our product? What are they? The more numbers and data the client can provide, the better.
  • Were you tracking any metrics prior to using our product? What were they? This will allow readers to get a clear, before-and-after comparison of using your product.
  • How has our product impacted your core metrics? This is an opportunity for your clients to drive home how your product assisted them in hitting their metrics and goals.

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Case Study Interview Questions About the Buying Team and Internal Advocates

See if there are any individuals at the customer's company who are advocates for your product.

  • Are there any additional team members you consider to be advocates for our product? For example, does anyone stick out as a "power user" or product expert on your team? You may want to interview and include these power users in your case study as well. Consider asking them for tips on using your service or product.
  • Is there anyone else on your team you think we should talk to? Again, the more people can share their experience using your product, the better.
  • Are there any team members who you think might not be the biggest fans of our product or who might need more training? Providing extra support to those struggling with your product may improve their user experience and turn into an opportunity to not only learn about their obstacles but turn them into a product fan
  • Would you share some details about how your team implemented our product? Get as much information as possible about the rollout. Hopefully, they'll gush about how seamless the process was.
  • Who from your company was involved in implementing our product? This will give readers more insight into who needs to be involved for a successful rollout of their own.
  • Were there any internal risks or additional costs involved with implementing our product? If so, how did you address them? This will give insight into the client's process and rollout and this case study question will likely provide tips on what potential leads should be on the lookout for.
  • Is there a training process in place for your team's use of our product? If so, what does it look like? If your company provided support and training to the client, have them describe that experience.
  • About how long does it take a new team member to get up to speed with our product? This will help leads determine how much time it will take to onboard an employee to your using your product. If a new user can quickly get started seamlessly, it bodes well for you.
  • What was your main concern about rolling this product out to your company? Describing their challenges in detail will provide readers with useful insight.

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Case Study Interview Questions About Customer Success

Has the customer found success with your product? Ask these questions to learn more.

  • By using our product can you measure any reduced costs? If it has, you'll want to emphasize those savings in your case study.
  • By using our product can you measure any improvements in productivity or time savings? Any metrics or specific stories your interviewee can provide will help demonstrate the value of your product.
  • By using our product can you measure any increases in revenue or growth? Again, say it with numbers and data whenever possible.
  • Are you likely to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? Recommendations from existing customers are some of the best marketing you can get.
  • How has our product impacted your success? Your team's success? Getting the interviewee to describe how your product played an integral role in solving their challenges will show leads that they can also have success using your product.
  • In the beginning, you had XYZ concerns; how do you feel about them now? Let them explain how working with your company eliminated those concerns.
  • I noticed your team is currently doing XYZ with our product. Tell me more about how that helps your business. Illustrate to your readers how current customers are using your product to solve additional challenges. It will convey how versatile your product is.
  • Have you thought about using our product for a new use case with your team or at your company? The more examples of use cases the client can provide, the better.
  • How do you measure the value our product provides? Have the interviewee illustrate what metrics they use to gauge the product's success and how. Data is helpful, but you should go beyond the numbers. Maybe your product improved company morale and how teams work together.

case-study-questions_6

Case Study Interview Questions About Product Feedback

Ask the customer if they'd recommend your product to others. A strong recommendation will help potential clients be more open to purchasing your product.

  • How do other companies in this industry solve the problems you had before you purchased our product? This will give you insight into how other companies may be functioning without your product and how you can assist them.
  • Have you ever talked about our product to any of your clients or peers? What did you say? This can provide you with more leads and a chance to get a referral.
  • Why would you recommend our product to a friend or client? Be sure they pinpoint which features they would highlight in a recommendation.
  • Can you think of any use cases your customers might have for our product? Similar industries may have similar issues that need solutions. Your interviewee may be able to provide a use case you haven't come up with.
  • What is your advice for other teams or companies who are tackling problems similar to those you had before you purchased our product? This is another opportunity for your client to talk up your product or service.
  • Do you know someone in X industry who has similar problems to the ones you had prior to using our product? The client can make an introduction so you can interview them about their experience as well.
  • I noticed you work with Company Y. Do you know if they are having any pain points with these processes? This will help you learn how your product has impacted your client's customers and gain insight into what can be improved.
  • Does your company participate in any partner or referral programs? Having a strong referral program will help you increase leads and improve customer retention.
  • Can I send you a referral kit as a thank-you for making a referral and give you the tools to refer someone to us? This is a great strategy to request a referral while rewarding your existing customers.
  • Are you interested in working with us to produce additional marketing content? The more opportunities you can showcase happy customers, the better.

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Case Study Interview Questions About Willingness to Make Referrals

  • How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or client? Ideally, they would definitely refer your product to someone they know.
  • Can you think of any use cases your customers might have for our product? Again, your interviewee is a great source for more leads. Similar industries may have similar issues that need solutions. They may be able to provide a use case you haven't come up with.
  • I noticed you work with Company Y; do you know if they are having any pain points with these processes? This will help you learn how your product has impacted your client's customers and gain insight into what can be improved.

case-study-questions_4

Case Study Interview Questions to Prompt Quote-Worthy Feedback

Enhance your case study with quotable soundbites from the customer. By asking these questions, prospects have more insight into other clients and their success with your product — which helps build trust.

  • How would you describe your process in one sentence prior to using our product? Ideally, this sentence would quickly and descriptively sum up the most prominent pain point or challenge with the previous process.
  • What is your advice to others who might be considering our product? Readers can learn from your customer's experience.
  • What would your team's workflow or process be like without our product? This will drive home the value your product provides and how essential it is to their business.
  • Do you think the investment in our product was worthwhile? Why? Have your customer make the case for the value you provide.
  • What would you say if we told you our product would soon be unavailable? What would this mean to you? Again, this illustrates how integral your product is to their business.
  • How would you describe our product if you were explaining it to a friend? Your customers can often distill the value of your product to their friends better than you can.
  • What do you love about your job? Your company? This gives the reader more background on your customer and their industry.
  • What was the worst part of your process before you started using our product? Ideally, they'd reiterate how your product helped solve this challenge.
  • What do you love about our product? Another great way to get the customer's opinion about what makes your product worth it.
  • Why do you do business with us? Hopefully, your interviewee will share how wonderful your business relationship is.

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Case Study Interview Questions About the Customers' Future Goals

Ask the customer about their goals, challenges, and plans for the future. This will provide insight into how a business can grow with your product.

  • What are the biggest challenges on the horizon for your industry? Chances are potential leads within the same industry will have similar challenges.
  • What are your goals for the next three months? Knowing their short-term goals will enable your company to get some quick wins for the client.
  • How would you like to use our product to meet those challenges and goals? This will help potential leads understand that your product can help their business as they scale and grow.
  • Is there anything we can do to help you and your team meet your goals? If you haven't covered it already, this will allow your interviewee to express how you can better assist them.
  • Do you think you will buy more, less, or about the same amount of our product next year? This can help you gauge how your product is used and why.
  • What are the growth plans for your company this year? Your team? This will help you gain insight into how your product can help them achieve future goals.
  • How can we help you meet your long-term goals? Getting specifics on the needs of your clients will help you create a unique solution designed for their needs.
  • What is the long-term impact of using our product? Get their feedback on how your product has created a lasting impact.
  • Are there any initiatives that you personally would like to achieve that our product or team can help with? Again, you want to continue to provide products that help your customers excel.
  • What will you need from us in the future? This will help you anticipate the customer's business needs.
  • Is there anything we can do to improve our product or process for working together in the future? The more feedback you can get about what is and isn't working, the better.

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Before you can start putting together your case study, you need to ask your customer's permission.

If you have a customer who's seen success with your product, reach out to them. Use this template to get started:

Thank you & quick request

Hi [customer name],

Thanks again for your business — working with you to [solve X, launch Y, take advantage of Z opportunity] has been extremely rewarding, and I'm looking forward to more collaboration in the future.

[Name of your company] is building a library of case studies to include on our site. We're looking for successful companies using [product] to solve interesting challenges, and your team immediately came to mind. Are you open to [customer company name] being featured?

It should be a lightweight process — [I, a product marketer] will ask you roughly [10, 15, 20] questions via email or phone about your experience and results. This case study will include a blurb about your company and a link to your homepage (which hopefully will make your SEO team happy!)

In any case, thank you again for the chance to work with you, and I hope you have a great week.

[Your name]

facebook case study questions

If one of your customers has recently passed along some praise (to you, their account manager, your boss; on an online forum; to another potential customer; etc.), then send them a version of this email:

Hey [customer name],

Thanks for the great feedback — I'm really glad to hear [product] is working well for you and that [customer company name] is getting the results you're looking for.

My team is actually in the process of building out our library of case studies, and I'd love to include your story. Happy to provide more details if you're potentially interested.

Either way, thank you again, and I look forward to getting more updates on your progress.

facebook case study questions

You can also find potential case study customers by usage or product data. For instance, maybe you see a company you sold to 10 months ago just bought eight more seats or upgraded to a new tier. Clearly, they're happy with the solution. Try this template:

I saw you just [invested in our X product; added Y more users; achieved Z product milestone]. Congratulations! I'd love to share your story using [product] with the world -- I think it's a great example of how our product + a dedicated team and a good strategy can achieve awesome results.

Are you open to being featured? If so, I'll send along more details.

facebook case study questions

Case Study Benefits

  • Case studies are a form of customer advocacy.
  • Case studies provide a joint-promotion opportunity.
  • Case studies are easily sharable.
  • Case studies build rapport with your customers.
  • Case studies are less opinionated than customer reviews.

1. Case studies are a form of customer advocacy.

If you haven't noticed, customers aren't always quick to trust a brand's advertisements and sales strategies.

With every other brand claiming to be the best in the business, it's hard to sort exaggeration from reality.

This is the most important reason why case studies are effective. They are testimonials from your customers of your service. If someone is considering your business, a case study is a much more convincing piece of marketing or sales material than traditional advertising.

2. Case studies provide a joint-promotion opportunity.

Your business isn't the only one that benefits from a case study. Customers participating in case studies benefit, too.

Think about it. Case studies are free advertisements for your customers, not to mention the SEO factor, too. While they're not promoting their products or services, they're still getting the word out about their business. And, the case study highlights how successful their business is — showing interested leads that they're on the up and up.

3. Case studies are easily sharable.

No matter your role on the sales team, case studies are great to have on hand. You can easily share them with leads, prospects, and clients.

Whether you embed them on your website or save them as a PDF, you can simply send a link to share your case study with others. They can share that link with their peers and colleagues, and so on.

Case studies can also be useful during a sales pitch. In sales, timing is everything. If a customer is explaining a problem that was solved and discussed in your case study, you can quickly find the document and share it with them.

4. Case studies build rapport with your customers.

While case studies are very useful, they do require some back and forth with your customers to obtain the exact feedback you're looking for.

Even though time is involved, the good news is this builds rapport with your most loyal customers. You get to know them on a personal level, and they'll become more than just your most valuable clients.

And, the better the rapport you have with them, the more likely they'll be to recommend your business, products, or services to others.

5. Case studies are less opinionated than customer reviews.

Data is the difference between a case study and a review. Customer reviews are typically based on the customer's opinion of your brand. While they might write a glowing review, it's completely subjective and there's rarely empirical evidence supporting their claim.

Case studies, on the other hand, are more data-driven. While they'll still talk about how great your brand is, they support this claim with quantitative data that's relevant to the reader. It's hard to argue with data.

An effective case study must be genuine and credible. Your case study should explain why certain customers are the right fit for your business and how your company can help meet their specific needs. That way, someone in a similar situation can use your case study as a testimonial for why they should choose your business.

Use the case study questions above to create an ideal customer case study questionnaire. By asking your customers the right questions, you can obtain valuable feedback that can be shared with potential leads and convert them into loyal customers.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in June 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Facebook Data Scientist Interview Guide

Facebook Data Scientist Interview Guide

Back to Meta

Introduction

The Facebook data science interview consists of multiple technical and business case questions, heavily focused on applying technical knowledge to business case scenarios. Facebook data scientists are expected to work cross-functionally and explore, analyze, and aggregate large data sets to provide actionable information.

Facebook Data Scientist Interview Process

Typically, interviews at Facebook vary by role and team, but commonly data science interview questions in SQL, business case, analytics and product metrics are asked.

We’ve gathered this data from parsing thousands of interview experiences sourced from members.

Facebook Data Scientist Interview Questions

Facebook interview questions generally fall into four main categories:

  • Product and business sense
  • Technical data analysis (SQL, pandas)
  • Statistics and probability
  • Modeling knowledge and applying data

The technical screen will generally consist of one product question and one data analysis question. Be sure to prepare for both in order to move on to the onsite.

Note : This process is the same for both those seeking full-time jobs at Facebook, as well as Facebook data science internships .

Facebook Case Study Interview Questions

Case study questions in Facebook data science interviews focus heavily on product metrics and business cases.

1. Facebook composer, the posting tool, drops from 3% posts per user last month to 2.5% posts per user today. How would you investigate what happened?

The question states the drop is from 3% a month ago to 2.5% today. The first thing we have to do is clarify the context around the problem before jumping to conclusions about metrics. Is today a weekday and one month from today a weekend, so users are posting less? Is there a special event or seasonality? Is this an ongoing downward trend or a one-time occurrence spike downwards?

The second part is understanding the metric itself. What drove the decrease: was it the number of users that increased or the number of posts that decreased? The interviewer will likely ask you to jump into one or both of the metrics to discuss what could have caused the decrease.‌

2. A Facebook Groups product manager decides to add threading to comments on group posts. Comments per user increase by 10%, but posts go down 2%. Why would that be? What metrics would prove your hypotheses?

Threading restructures the flow of comments so that, instead of responding to the post, users can now respond to individual comments beneath the post. What effect might this have on a push notification ecosystem?

3. Facebook is rolling out a new feature called “Mentions” which is an app specifically for celebrities on Facebook to connect with their fans. How would you measure the health of the Mentions app?

We can start by breaking down some structure of what the interviewer is looking for. Whenever we’re given these open-ended product questions, it makes sense to think about structuring the questions with well-defined objectives, so we’re not switching between different answers.

  • Did you begin by stating what the goals of the feature are before jumping into defining metrics? What is the point of the Mentions feature?
  • Are your answers structured, or do you tend to talk about random points?
  • Are the metrics definitions specific, or are they generalized in an example like “I would find out if people used Mentions frequently”?

4. How can Facebook figure out when users falsify their attended schools?

5. if 70% of facebook users on ios use instagram, but only 35% of facebook users on android use instagram, how would you investigate the discrepancy, 6. facebook newsfeed engagement is down by 10%. how would you find out why, facebook sql interview questions.

SQL questions are the most frequently asked in Facebook data science interviews. See additional practice questions in our guide Facebook SQL Interview Questions .

1. Write a SQL query to create a histogram of the number of comments per user in the month of January 2020. Assume bin buckets class intervals of one.

users table

comments table

Since a histogram is just a display of frequencies of each user, all we really need to do is get the total count of user comments in the month of January 2020 for each user, and then group by that count.

2. In the table below, column action represents either (‘post_enter’, ‘post_submit’, ‘post_canceled’) for when a user starts a post (enter), ends up canceling it (cancel), or ends up posting it (submit).

events  table

Write a query to get the post success rate for each day in the month of January 2020.

Let’s see if we can clearly define the metrics we want to calculate before just jumping into the problem. We want post success rate for each day over the past week.

To get that metric, we can assume post success rate can be defined as:

(total posts created) / (total posts entered)

Additionally, since the success rate must be broken down by day, we must make sure that a post that is entered must be completed on the same day.

Now that we have these requirements, it’s time to calculate our metrics. We know we have to GROUP BY the date to get each day’s posting success rate. We also have to break down how we can compute our two metrics of total posts entered and total posts actually created.

3. We want to build a naive recommender, and we’re given two tables, one table called friends with a user_id and friend_id columns representing each user’s friends, and another table called page_likes with a user_id and a page_id representing the page each user liked.

friends table

page_likes table

Write an SQL query to create a metric to recommend pages for each user based on recommendations from their friends liked pages.

We can start by visualizing what kind of output we want from the query. Given that we have to create a metric for each user to recommend pages, we know we want something with a user_id and a page_id along with some sort of recommendation score.

How can we easily represent the scores of each user_id and page_id combo? One naive method would be to create a score by summing up the total likes by friends on each page that the user hasn’t currently liked. The max value on our metric would be the most recommendable page.

The first thing we have to do then is to write a query to associate users to their friends liked pages. We can do that easily with an initial join between the two tables.

Statistics and Probability Interview Questions

Statistics and probability questions assess your understanding of mathematical concepts and how they’re used in data science interviews at Facebook.

1. What do you think the distribution of time spent per day on Facebook looks like? What metrics would you use to describe that distribution?

Having the vocabulary to describe a distribution is an important skill as a data scientist when it comes to communicating ideas to your peers. There are four important concepts with supporting vocabulary that you can use to structure your answer to a question like this. These are:

  • Center (mean, median, mode)
  • Spread (standard deviation, interquartile range, range)
  • Shape (skewness, kurtosis, uni or bimodal)
  • Outliers (Do they exist?)

In terms of the distribution of time spent per day on Facebook (FB), one can imagine there may be two groups of people on Facebook:

  • People who scroll quickly through their feed and don’t spend too much time on FB.
  • People who spend a large amount of their social media time on FB.

Based on this, what kind of claims could we make about the distribution of time spent on FB?

2. We use people to rate ads. There are two types of raters, random and independent, from our point of view:

  • 80% of raters are careful, and they rate an ad as good (60% chance) or bad (40% chance).
  • 20% of raters are lazy, and they rate every ad as good (100% chance).

Suppose we have 100 raters, each rating one ad independently. What’s the expected number of good ads? Keep in mind that in order for the rater to rate an ad, the rater must first be selected. So the event that the rater is selected happens first, then the rating happens. How would you represent this fact arithmetically using the basic properties of probability?

Hint : If we only have one rater, we don’t need to test that rater’s personality more than once.

3. Three zebras are chilling in the desert when a lion suddenly attacks. Each zebra is sitting on a corner of an equally spaced triangle. Each zebra randomly picks a direction and only runs along the outline of the triangle to either edge of the triangle.

What is the probability that none of the zebras collide? There are two scenarios in which the zebras do not collide: if they all move clockwise or if they all move counterclockwise.

How do we calculate the probability that an individual zebra chooses to move clockwise or counterclockwise? How can we use this individual probability to calculate the probability that all zebras choose to move in the same direction?

Facebook Machine Learning Interview Questions

Facebook machine learning interview questions focus on algorithms, systems design, applied modeling and recommendation engines.

1. How would you test whether having more friends now increases the probability that a Facebook member is still an active user after 6 months?

Since we are interested in whether or not someone will be an active user in 6 months or not, we can test this assumption by first looking at the existing data. One way to do so is to put users into buckets determined by friend size six months ago and then look at their activity over the next six months.

If we set a metric to define “active user”, such as if they logged in X number of times, posted once, etc., we can then just compute the averages on these metrics across the buckets to determine if more friends are equivalent to higher engagement metrics.

2. We’re given different posts such as your friends baby pictures, Buzzfeed Tasty videos, and birthday posts and have to decide how to rank them.

How would you optimize the ratio of public versus private content? How would you build a model, what features would you use, and what metrics would you track?

3. You’ve been asked to generate a machine learning model that can map the nicknames of people using Facebook. How do you go about designing this model?

4. a product manager has asked you to develop a method to match users to their siblings on facebook. how would you evaluate a method or algorithm to match users with their siblings what metrics might you use, facebook system design interview questions.

In Facebook data scientist interviews, system design questions require you to walk the interviewer through building recommendation engines, models, etc.

1. How would you build the recommendation algorithm for type-ahead search for Netflix?

Let’s think about a simple use case to start out with. Say that we type in the word “hello” for the beginning of a movie.

If we typed in h-e-l-l-o, then a suitable suggestion might be a movie like “Hello Sunshine” or a Spanish movie named “Hola”.

Let’s now move on to an MVP within the scope. We can begin to think of the solution in the form of a prefix table .

How a prefix table works is that your prefix, your input string, outputs your output string, one at a time to start with. For an mvp, we could input a string and output a suggestion string with added fuzzy matching and context matching.

But now, how do we recommend a certain movie?

Facebook Coding Interview Questions

In Facebook data scientist interviews, Python questions are asked, and typically, they require you to perform algorithmic coding.

1. There are two lists of dictionaries representing friendship beginnings and endings: friends_added and friends_removed. Each dictionary contains the user_ids and created_at time of the friendship beginning/ending.

Write a function to generate an output which lists the pairs of friends with their corresponding timestamps of the friendship beginning and then the timestamp of the friendship ending.

Note that you are only looking for friendships that have an end date. Because of this, every friendship that will be in our final output is contained within the friends_removed list. So if you start by iterating through the friends_removed dictionary, you will already have the id pair and the end date of each listing in our final output–you just need to find the corresponding start date for each end date.

The friends_added and friends_removed dictionaries are already sorted by date. Because of this, you can be sure that as long as you iterate from the top through both, you will find the correct pairings of dates since each end date can only have one corresponding start date appearing before it in time.

2. In data science, there exists the concept of stemming, which is the heuristic of chopping off the end of a word to clean and bucket it into an easier feature set.

Given a dictionary consisting of many roots and a sentence, stem all the words in the sentence with the root forming it. If a word has many roots can form it, replace it with the root with the shortest length.

At first, it simply looks like we can just loop through each word and check if the root exists in the word and, if so, replace the word with the root. But since we are technically stemming the words we have to make sure that the roots are equivalent to the word at its prefix rather than existing anywhere within the word.

We’re given a dictionary of roots with a sentence string. Given we have to check each word, try creating a function that takes a word and returns the existing word if it doesn’t match a root or returns the root itself.

3. You’re given a dataframe of students:

Write a function to select only the rows where the student’s favorite color is green or red, and their grade is above 90 .

This question requires us to filter a dataframe by two conditions: first, the grade of the student, and second, their favorite color.

Let’s start with filtering by grade since it’s a bit simpler than filtering by strings. We can filter columns in pandas by setting our dataframe equal to itself with the filter in place. In this case:

If we were to look at our dataframe after passing that line of code, we’d see that every student with a lower grade than 90 no longer appears in our data frame.‌‌

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1 2 case facebook case study+questions

Profile image of Clara Bonilla

This case study about social network, FaceBook is taken from my Internet Marketing and Ebusiness text books. The case is presented as key events during the development of Facebook. The case study illustrates some of the marketing opportunities available for businesses on a social network (see the Smart Insights site). Tags (view related articles): E-commerce case studies, Online PR / E-PR, Social networks 1.1. Facebook vision According to it's owners, Facebook "Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment".

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In the last century, the advances in technology have brought enormous changes for consumers, markets and marketing. From the early years of this century, information technologies have been invading the conventional market, evolving into what it is today. One of the factors that enable this technology wave is social media. As the possibilities of expression are increasing in social media, consumers also increase their ability to intluence others through their own experiences. Some cases, particularly Facebook, have seen a spectacular growth. There are few studies on the phenomenon, so it is intended, in this study, through empirical observation and theoretical analysis to analyze the reactions of individuals in social media (particularly in Facebook) and its contluence with the organizations

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The Ultimate List of Facebook Ads Case Studies (+ 38 lessons you can’t ignore)

facebook case study questions

by: 6 Comments

Without a doubt, Facebook is THE place to be to build audiences and generate revenue.

You know it, I know it… Every single marketer knows it.

But with it’s decreasing organic reach, you’ll need to rely on Facebook Ads more than ever.

That means your money is on the line, which is why you’ll want to know  what REALLY works and what doesn’t work  before you even get started.

So, to bust all the myths and speculations, we’ve been analyzing 13 Facebook Ads case studies from various well-known experts.

From campaigns spending $1/day to millions a year. Campaigns focused on bringing in hundreds of thousands in revenue as well as bringing in low-cost leads.

You’ll get to see it all in the following 13 Facebook Ads case-studies.

example-3

Case Study # 1 – What Noah Kagan Learned Spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads

This is the case study and key insights from Noah Kogan who has spent millions on Facebook Ads so far.

The advice and lessons learned from this case study will be far more insightful than people that have to spend some hundred or thousands of dollar on Facebook Ads.

Noah Kagan of AppSumo and SumoMe shared his experience spending $2 million on Facebook Ads across his different products.

Apart from promoting his key products ( AppSumo and SumoMe ), he showed how he earned $267 in profit from each Monthly1k course he sells.

He used Facebook Advertising to bring traffic to his website, increase his email subscription and later sell them the course.

image22

Each email lead would cost him $3, and every 89th email lead went on to buy the course giving him $267 in net profit (after all deductions, cancellations, etc.effectively).

This is a classical example of how to best leverage Facebook Ads. People browse Facebook for casual fun, catching up with friends and family – but not to being sold.

It is best to use Facebook to drive them to opt-in to your lead magnet before pushing them your product.

They will be more inclined to engage with your Facebook Ads if it’s not asking for their credit card but rather giving some value without any cost to them.

Although, he provided a lot of insight from his million dollar spending on Facebook Ads, here are some of the key takeaways and lessons learned.

Lesson Learned # 1 –  Use data at hand effectively to target your Facebook ads strategically. Such as copying the success of your competitors , targeting the fans of your competitors and creating lookalike audience from existing customers and email subscribers.

Lesson Learned # 2 – Start with a small budget and capitalize on the ads targeting which is giving you the best ROI.

Lesson Learned # 3 – Keep your targeting narrow than being broad. Narrower audiences not only is easier to reach on a limited budget but are highly likely to convert. But narrow audience doesn’t mean it has to be small, rather an ideal size ( in between narrow and broad)

section_2

Case Study # 2 – $5800 Monthly Recurring Revenue Using Facebook Ads Retargeting

Design Pickle is a design-as-a-service that provides unlimited graphics designing services under a monthly retainer fee. Being a newer concept and a service that requires a direct interaction of humans ( as in passing design briefs and requirements), it is hard to promote the service using standard means.

Following the footsteps of how most SaaS businesses generate leads, they  ran a Facebook Ad Campaign in which they offered a Free Custom Design without the need for any credit card ( an equivalent to Free Trial)

image23

They directed the Facebook Ads traffic to a long-form signup form so they would weed out potential customers from onlookers. This was deliberately done as people that go on to filling the long form were most likely to be interested in the services.

image11

Although they were able to capture some leads, the best part came when they started using retargeting.

Want to get more results from Facebook Ads? Check out our free targeting training here.

Design Pickle identified that they could use retargeting with better effect. So they implemented a retargeting campaign on the sales page visitors which accounted for 17 of the 30 new customers.

More than 50% of their new customers just came from the retargeting marketing campaign, which justifies the fact that converting a retargeted visitor is much easier and efficient than converting a new one.

Lesson Learned # 4 – No matter how complex, unique or new (business model) type of business you have, Facebook Ads can still work for you.

Lesson Learned # 5 – Use the magnetic power of retargeting to bring back customers that already have shown interest in your products.

Lesson Learned # 6 – Build a sales funnel along with your Facebook Ads. Such as in this case, people that initially saw the ad but didn’t go on to fill up the form were retargeted again.

section_3

Case Study # 3 – What Will  $5/day on Facebook Get You?

With the tremendous growth of businesses interest in advertising and marketing their product on Facebook,   Buffer did a small experiment to see how a minimal investment of $5 on Facebook Ads can give them.

The $5 ad spend was tested for different objectives such as page likes, clicks to website and effects on boosted post.

And here are the results they achieved for every $5 spend on each of the activity below;

Page Likes – 9 Likes per day

Clicks to the homepage / landing page – 1 per day

Boosted post – 787 new people reached

So there is something for business seen on a small budget.

Here is the audience targeting they set;

image18

As you can see, they’re targeting people who are interested in social media, excluding their fans.

Furthermore, just to give you an example of creating a Killer Facebook Ad, see this the ad buffer created for the Page Likes campaign.

image03

Apparently, this ad comes across as very social/human (since it’s showing the team) – which is why it’s been working well for a “like” campaign.

So to get the best bang out of your Facebook Ads even on a small budget, try zooming in your target audience and create ads copy that reflect or resonate with them.

Lesson Learned # 7 – If you want to test the Facebook Ads waters or generate buzz for your product, a small budget can also do good for you. Not only it creates awareness for your business, but you might also score a handy traffic and some sales too in the process.

Lesson Learned # 8 – You don’t need a large budget to succeed with Facebook Ads. If you target and optimize the ads well, you still can get a good traction regardless of your objective.

Lesson Learned # 9 – When targeting for page likes, always make sure that you Exclude your current page followers.

Lesson Learned # 10 – Make sure the ad image / creative you select, must match with the objective of the ad.

section_4

Case Study # 4 – Facebook Ads Success with just $1 per Day

Similar to the Buffer experiment, this case study by Brian Carter , a prominent Facebook Marketing and Advertising Expert and Bestselling author of the book “ The Like Economy”  showed that even investing a minimum of $1/day on Facebook Ads  can give you a significant reach.

By consistently investing $1/day for 30 days, he was able to reach 120,000 people or 4000 people every day.

He in an active user of most advertising platforms and this is what he found as the cost to reach 1000 people using popular advertising channels.

image19

Facebook Ads are far cheaper than the legacy advertising solutions (newspaper, tv, etc.), but also left behind its online competitors (Adwords and LinkedIn).

The objective of this case study or experiment was to show that even if you start with a minimal budget, Facebook Ads can still prove beneficial.

52fab535542836-78046596

Most businesses can afford to spend $1/day on Facebook, can’t they?

Lesson Learned  # 11 – Budget is or should not be a roadblock for virtually any business. $1/day or $30/month is not a big deal for most businesses.

Lesson Learned # 12 – Even if you are investing more on other channels for traffic or lead generation successfully, it doesn’t hurt to spend a small proportion on Facebook Ads. You might get the same number of traffic, but the overall cost will be much cheaper than all other alternatives.

Check out more details about this case study here.

section_5

Case Study # 5 – $14,114 in revenue from $8,240.17 spent in Facebook Ads

This case study is purely about generating leads than anything else.

Brian Moran , the founder of SamCart , used  Facebook As to sell his courses and training products .

He tested three different targeting groups where;

  • One group was his existing email list.
  • The 2nd group was the lookalike version of his email list.
  • And the third was custom audience he created using the native+ advanced targeting features of Facebook.

And after spending $8240 on the ads on these groups, he was able to get;

  • $3496 in Sales from $1800 in ad spend from group 1
  • $1546 in Sales from $895 in ad spend from group 2
  • $9039 in Sales from $5153 in ad spend from group 3

image29

Although all of the ads returned an ROI of 2:1, the 3rd group clearly outperformed the others.

So as seen, changing and testing around with your targeting can give you better results than standard targeting.

Typically existing subscribers are considered a gold mine to be reaped over and over but Brian proved that you can still succeed with Facebook Ads if you just get you targeting right.

Even if you don’t have a big list of subscribers, using native targeting features of Facebook can bring you in front of the right viewers.

Lesson Learned # 13 – Retarget or advertise your offer to existing subscribers as well. This is particularly helpful if you want to convert your blog subscribers into warm leads or paying customers .

Lesson Learned # 14 – Use lookalike audience effectively. Brian created a lookalike audience from his existing email subscribers that brought in $1546 in revenue from $895 in ad spend.

Lesson Learned # 15 – Fine tune your advertising to narrow down to your targeted audience as much as possible. Brian got the best response from the custom targeting he set up.

Lesson Learned # 16 – Just beside A/B testing your Facebook ad copy , split test between your targeting groups too. When seeing results from the third group, Brian invested more in it, and the results were equally rewarding.

section_6

Case Study # 6 – How an Advertising “FAIL” Can Actually Turn Into a “WIN”

This case study is rather interesting as it started off from a failure before they got their winning aha-moment.

Angela Ponsford started a Facebook Ad campaign for her client who wanted to sell a high-priced $990 home renovation program to women’s in 30-40 age range across the USA.

The idea was to build an email list via Facebook Ads and later show them ads for Free Webinar that will lead to the program she wants to sell.

When they run the ads, they performed well, but most of the people that were engaging with it were not the actual audience perceived.

She thought women in the 30-40 age group would take more interest in her program, but women above 45+ were engaging most with her ad and content.

The first few days just yielded in 2 sign ups at the cost of nearly $27 each. So she optimized the ad targeting and the ad copy in line with the results they achieved earlier.

image00

The second run significantly improved the cost/lead, dragging it down to 4 leads at $5.43 each.

After several rounds of testing and tuning with targeting and ad copies, she was able to bag in 400 leads at a cost $507 and some happy customers that went on buying the program.

image25

One of their best performing ads was shared 14 times which indicated that the ad copy was talking to the customer and performed well.

It is essential that you keep on monitoring and optimizing your campaign- especially at the start. Angela was able to reduce the cost/lead from $27 to just $1.27 in the end by continually improving the campaign in the line of results she was getting.

Unless you have a large budget to spend, test your campaign in small budget / test runs until you find what’s working or you might end up spending a lot of money with little results.

Lesson Learned # 17 – There is no barrier to the type and cost of the product you are selling – you can even sell a high priced product using Facebook Ads .

Lesson Learned # 18 – Do some preliminary ad test to fine tune on the audience and then invest more budget where you get the most gold.

Lesson Learned # 19 – The ideal audience perceived by you might not always be correct.

Lesson Learned # 20 – Sometimes the simplest of thing are most effective. By changing the word “Webinar” to “Workshop” on the ad copy, the CTR and leads doubled.

section_7

Case Study # 7 – 89% cheaper cost / lead with Facebook Ads

Google Adwords in arguably the most used platform when it comes to online advertising. Hundreds of thousands of businesses use its daily traffic and leads.

But, it’s still expensive to reach for some.

Dave Rogenmoser of The Market Results, identified that cost/lead for a high-end app and web development company ranges between $250 – $1000 / lead on Adwords.

Although $250/lead was a good deal for a $80,000 contract, they wanted more.

Fast forward, they leveraged the narrow-down targeting capabilities of Facebook to target startups that might be in need of app development .

Dave mentioned that the hardest part of the campaign for them was to set targeting for their audience. As we saw from earlier case studies, narrowing down on your target audience is much more beneficial than broadening it.

And he did exactly just that- zoomed in on funded startups that might be in need of app development.

With a spend of $993 across a week, they were able to score 34 leads which was far much quicker and cheaper than Google Adwords.

image20

From the first week of the run, they were able to decrease their cost/lead to $28 a piece, 89% cheaper than what it takes from Adwords.

Want similar results? Check out our free targeting training here.

This goes to show you that how cost effective leads from Facebook can turn out to be when compared with other options.

Lesson Learned # 21 – Facebook Ads are cost effective as compared to Google Adwords when it comes to B2B leads generation.

Lesson Learned # 22 – Facebook ads provide narrower targeting which helps you to laser in on your ideal audience. Setting up the correct targeting is one of the essential parts of your campaign.

section_8

Case Study # 8 – 7 Mistakes Made While Spending $234.07 on Facebook Ads

At Connectio we often hear customers saying that they have none or very limited success via Facebook Ads. Either it was not giving the desired results or is turning out to be expensive for them.

This case study is especially useful for such Facebook Ad starter business that is struggling to find their way.

Philip Kleudgen, a web development, and marketing specialist for restaurant owners, shares his experience of how he started off with Facebook Ads- with no prior experience .

As like more people starting off with Facebook Ads, he made some classic mistakes such as;

  • Targeting was not set correctly.  He was targeting a very little set of individuals.
  • Used only one image and didn’t A/B test between different images or ad copies.
  • Wasn’t tracking conversions correctly due to missing or improper configuration
  • Keep running ads that were unprofitable.

After running the ad for week or so, he spent $234 on Facebook Ads with a meager CTR and earned less than the actual ad spend.

Although, he was at a loss at this campaign some valuable lessons learned.

But at such stage, most businesses give up rather than realizing their mistakes and optimizing their campaign accordingly.

So it’s important to review and analyze performance and mistakes in your Facebook Ads campaign before ruling the platform as a failure.

Lesson Learned # 23 – Take some pre-campaign time to research and identify your targeted audience. Ideally, have a separate ad set for each unique audience you are targeting.

Lesson Learned # 24 – If your objective is lead generation or sales, you need to set your conversion tracking and do it right. If you aren’t tracking your conversions correctly how would you analyze performance?

Lesson Learned # 25 – Have multiple images and copies of your ad in hand before starting a campaign.

Lesson Learned # 26 – Don’t spend that much money on ads or campaigns that are not giving any result.

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Case Study # 9 – How Veeroll Sold 122 Subscriptions with $2.5k Spend on Facebook Ads in 2 Weeks

This case study is another classical example that Facebook can be effectively used to generate leads for B2B businesses. B2B businesses. It also shows how businesses can gain better results by using video ads and continually optimizing the campaign to improve performance. Veeroll along with other places started off their campaign on Facebook and sent all traffic to a webinar funnel . They were also tracking website conversions to know how many people referred from Facebook were converting on that landing page.

They set their targeting and created the ads. Initially, they were getting a higher CPC.

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Although their primary objective was to show the video ads, they also tested the text ad along with it and they saw a huge difference between both.

This the stats on their text ad;

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And compare that to the video ad;

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They spent a little more on the video ads, but have 18X more engagement and were 3.5X more than the text ads.

So seeing the video ads were proving better, they went on creating multiple video ads.

This is one of the video ads they were using.

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Specifically, implementing retargeting on the website helped them lower their CPC and improve their conversions.

At the end of 2 weeks campaign, they were able to have 122 signups that resulted in $11,000 of monthly revenue that too just from a $2500 in ad spend.

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That is almost 400% is profit against the cost of Facebook Ads, not to mention that the lifetime value of these customers will be way much than this.

Lesson Learned # 27 – Don’t get faltered from initial road bumps. Review the performance and capitalize where most performance is achieved. Such as mobile users were engaging far more than desktop users in this case so apparently it makes sense to pour more budget here.

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Lesson Learned # 28 –  Retargeted traffic gave better conversion then the cold traffic. Veeroll has the lowest CPC and conversion from retargeted ads.

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Lesson Learned # 29 – Don’t just stick to conventional ad styles. Try video ads too. They have incredible engagement and lets you communicate more message than what it takes from text and image ads.

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Case Study # 10 – Reaping $163,969 in revenue from $5989 of ad spend in just 34 days

This is an absorbing Facebook Ad Case Study as it not only achieved a remarkable result but worked on an approach that will work in any niche – yes any niche. It is also very helpful for startup businesses that have none or small following and email list.

Paul Romando’s  Facebook Ad’s campaign for his client returned a staggering $163,969 in revenue from a mere $5989 in ad investment.

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That’s an insane 2737.80% of return in just 34 days of the campaign.

Paul’s success formula was simple.

Rather than going for the hard sell, he created a Facebook funnel, where leads first opted in on content ( lead magnet) around a product.

And later, for all those that opted in, Paul would show a different ad set that directly takes them to the sale page.

He calls this is the Elope Approach.

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His multi-step Facebook Ad Strategy builds up a connection with your targeted audience before going for the sale. This helps in nurturing leads and segmenting people that are most likely to convert.

Particularly important was the Facebook Ad relevance score. A high Facebook Ad relevance score helped your ad not being flagged by Facebook and delivered to your targeted audience.

So when he showed the sales ads to his existing audience, a high relevance score for imminent as these people already knew him.

For most B2B businesses having a Facebook Sales Funnel is crucial. It might sound a lot of work but gains are immense, and you can use it over and over again.

Lessons Learned # 30 – Rather than going straight for sales, develop a Facebook funnel through a lead magnet. Once you have subscribers in your funnel, nurture them with you offer ads.

Lessons Learned # 31 – Use different ads / ad sets for the retargeted audience / warm leads. Since they already know about your product, take them straight to your money page.

For example, create a different ads / ad set for cold and warm leads and make sure that you exclude each one of them in the targeting set.

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Case Study # 11 – How Wahida Generated High-Quality Leads With Just $10/Day

Sending people straight to a sales page might work in commodity niches such as online stores, but for B2B services it’s essential to capture the leads first.

This case study came from Wahida Lakhani, one of the students of Claire Pelletreau from her Ad Consultant Incubator program. She was able to manage a very low cost / lead for a client in health and fitness niche.

The idea was same as Paul Romano – generate leads using a lead magnet and then move on for the sale.

But she tweaked it a bit.

Rather than sending them to a lead magnet straight away, she added another layer. She sent the traffic from Facebook ad to a high-quality article on the blog and added a lead magnet as the content upgrade.

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The original article was on creating “Easy Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars” but she added the details of the lead magnet “6 Vegan and Gluten-Free Recipes.”

This is uber awesome, provided you have an ultra high-quality article that drives CTR from Facebook and an equally irresistible lead magnet.To ensure they provided the detail of valuable content in the ad, she also added the lead magnet detailed information in the FB ad.

The results were 10/10 relevance score from Facebook, high CTR ( 5%)  and lead cost at just $0.65.

Want 10/10 relevance scores also? Check out our free targeting training here.

This was far less than the industry standard in health and wellness. So regardless of how competitive your niche is, there is still an opportunity for to score dirt-cheap leads.

Lesson Learned # 32 – Having a high-quality content helps in generating high CTR, better engagement, and lead generation.

Lesson Learned # 33 – Use your Facebook Ad effectively to list all the value you are providing. This will make your case stronger and gives the reader more reason to interact with your ad.

Lesson Learned # 34 – With a well thought out plan / funnel / strategy, you can shatter any industry benchmarks no matter how competitive your niche is.

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Case Study # 12 –  How Mary Got 532 Subscribers in 43 days Using Facebook Ads

For startup businesses and bloggers, getting new subscribers for their blog is often challenging. They might end up producing high-quality content but fail to attract the subscribers/ optins they would expect.

This case study will help you understand that how can you use Facebook Ads to generate more subscribers for your blog.

Mary Fernandez shows how she gained new blog subscribers for just $0.43 each using video ads.

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One common thing that she experienced in building blog subscribers for her clients was that personalizing the ad gave better results than a stock-photo ad.

Such as these are some examples of a personalized ad.

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And this too;

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Why these ads?

View the Facebook from the standpoint of a potential subscriber.

They are probably surfing Facebook to see what their friends are doing, following up with family and socializing but not to view ads.

If your ad looks like a traditional ad, there is a high chance that they will ignore it. But if they see something relevant or something which might not be another ad from the laundry, they are more likely to engage.

So where possible try to use a personal looking photo of you or your employees, instead of stock photos.

Lessons Learned # 35 – Facebook Ads can be used for any objective – even if its finding or increasing new subscribers for your blog.

Lesson Learned # 36 – Keep your ads as personal as possible. Your audience will be more likely to interact with your ad if it has a human effect / touch.

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Case Study # 13 – How Servando got 500% ROI from a $20 Facebook Ad budget

This case study is especially useful for people and businesses that don’t have a product of their own but are promoting affiliate products.

We have often seen our customers using Facebook Ads for promoting affiliate offers, but they seem to struggle in creating an effective strategy.

One of the biggest mistakes they make is not using the landing page effectively.

It’s not difficult or impossible to send traffic from Facebook. If you set your targeting right, you will still be able to get the required traffic.

However, if you are promoting affiliate products on Facebook , don’t send them straight to a sales page but to a “bridge” page first.

This is what Servando Silva of Stream-Seo did. For the affiliate offer, he was promoting using two landing pages.

1 – One page that had a description of the offer and a Free Trial button that took them straight to the sales page.

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2 – One that has an opt-in form ( just for email) and after submitting will lead to the sales page.

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He spent overall $20 on ads on both the ads pages and was able to earn $100 in commission and 60 valuable leads.

Though the sales came from the first page, he was able to score valuable leads via the second ad and landing page.

Not only did he earn $80 over his $20 spend, but he also grew his list which he can leverage in the future.

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From the 198 people that clicked on from his Facebook Ads , almost 119 clicked on to the affiliate link. So this shows that bringing quality traffic certainly works in your favor.

Lesson Learned # 37 – If you want the best ROI from your campaigns, don’t just focus on the Facebook Ad part – plan ahead where you will send the traffic and how will you capitalize on them.

Lesson Learned # 38 – Create multiple funnels and objectives from different ad sets and landing pages. Such as in this case he tested two ads on two different landing pages giving him multiple segmented audiences.

So there you have it – an in-depth review of the best handpicked Facebook Ads Case studies from nearly all types of businesses with variable objectives.

By reviewing the above case studies, it is evident that the success of Facebook Ads lies in multiple things. But it’s also clear that budget is not a primary factor, and you can succeed with even minimal of the budget.

What’s your favorite case study?

Facebook’s ethical failures are not accidental; they are part of the business model

  • Opinion Paper
  • Published: 05 June 2021
  • Volume 1 , pages 395–403, ( 2021 )

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  • David Lauer   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0003-4521 1  

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Facebook’s stated mission is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But a deeper look at their business model suggests that it is far more profitable to drive us apart. By creating “filter bubbles”—social media algorithms designed to increase engagement and, consequently, create echo chambers where the most inflammatory content achieves the greatest visibility—Facebook profits from the proliferation of extremism, bullying, hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theory, and rhetorical violence. Facebook’s problem is not a technology problem. It is a business model problem. This is why solutions based in technology have failed to stem the tide of problematic content. If Facebook employed a business model focused on efficiently providing accurate information and diverse views, rather than addicting users to highly engaging content within an echo chamber, the algorithmic outcomes would be very different.

Facebook’s failure to check political extremism, [ 15 ] willful disinformation, [ 39 ] and conspiracy theory [ 43 ] has been well-publicized, especially as these unseemly elements have penetrated mainstream politics and manifested as deadly, real-world violence. So it naturally raised more than a few eyebrows when Facebook’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun tweeted his concern [ 32 ] over the role of right-wing personalities in downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. Critics were quick to point out [ 29 ] that Facebook has profited handsomely from exactly this brand of disinformation. Consistent with Facebook’s recent history on such matters, LeCun was both defiant and unconvincing.

In response to a frenzy of hostile tweets, LeCun made the following four claims:

Facebook does not cause polarization or so-called “filter bubbles” and that “most serious studies do not show this.”

Critics [ 30 ] who argue that Facebook is profiting from the spread of misinformation—are “factually wrong.” Footnote 1

Facebook uses AI-based technology to filter out [ 33 ]:

Hate speech;

Calls to violence;

Bullying; and

Disinformation that endangers public safety or the integrity of the democratic process.

Facebook is not an “arbiter of political truth” and that having Facebook “arbitrate political truth would raise serious questions about anyone’s idea of ethics and liberal democracy.”

Absent from the claims above is acknowledgement that the company’s profitability depends substantially upon the polarization LeCun insists does not exist.

Facebook has had a profound impact on our access to ideas, information, and one another. It has unprecedented global reach, and in many markets serves as a de-facto monopolist. The influence it has over individual and global affairs is unique in human history. Mr. LeCun has been at Facebook since December 2013, first as Director of AI Research and then as Chief AI Scientist. He has played a leading role in shaping Facebook’s technology and approach. Mr. LeCun’s problematic claims demand closer examination. What follows, therefore, is a response to these claims which will clearly demonstrate that Facebook:

Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [ 16 ];

Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;

Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;

Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;

Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and

Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

1 I deleted my Facebook account

I deleted my account years ago for the reasons noted above, and a number of far more personal reasons. So when LeCun reached out to me, demanding evidence for my claims regarding Facebook’s improprieties, it was via Twitter. What proof did I have that Facebook creates filter bubbles that drive polarization?

In anticipation of my response, he offered the claims highlighted above. As evidence of his claims, he directed my attention to a single research paper [ 23 ] that, on closer inspection, does not appear at all to reinforce his case.

The entire exchange also suggests that senior leadership at Facebook still suffers from a massive blindspot regarding the harm that its platform causes—that they continue to “move fast and break things” without regard for the global impact of their behavior.

LeCun’s comments confirm the concerns that many of us have held for a long time: Facebook has declined to resolve its systemic problems, choosing instead to paper over these deep philosophical flaws with advanced, though insufficient, technological solutions. Even when Facebook takes occasion to announce its triumphs in the ethical use of AI, such as its excellent work [ 8 ] detecting suicidal tendencies, its advancements pale in comparison to the inherent problems written into its algorithms.

This is because, fundamentally, their problem is not a failure of technology, nor a shortcoming in their AI filters. Facebook’s problem is its business model. Facebook makes superficial technology changes, but at its core, profits chiefly from engagement and virality. Study after study has found that “lies spread faster than the truth,” [ 47 ] “conspiracy theories spread through a more decentralized network,” [ 41 ] and that “politically extreme sources tend to generate more interactions from users.” Footnote 2 Facebook knows that the most efficient way to maximize profitability is to build algorithms that create filter bubbles and spread viral misinformation.

This is not a fringe belief or controversial opinion. This is a reality acknowledged even by those who have lived inside of Facebook’s leadership structure. As the former director of monetization for Facebook, Tim Kendall explained in his Congressional testimony, “social media services that I, and others have built, have torn people apart with alarming speed and intensity. At the very least we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war.” [ 38 ]

2 Facebook’s black box

To effectively study behavior on Facebook, we must be able to study Facebook’s algorithms and AI models. Therein lies the first problem. The data and transparency to do so are simply not there. Facebook does not practice transparency—they do not make comprehensive data available on their recommendation and filtering algorithms, or their other implementations of AI. One organization attempting to study the spread of misinformation, NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy, explains, “[o]ur findings are limited by the lack of data provided by Facebook…. Without greater transparency and access to data, such research questions are out of reach.” Footnote 3

Facebook’s algorithms and AI models are proprietary, and they are intentionally hidden from us. While this is normal for many companies, no other company has 2.85 billion monthly active users. Any platform that touches so many lives must be studied so that we can truly understand its impact. Yet Facebook does not make the kind of data available that is needed for robust study of the platform.

Facebook would likely counter this, and point to their partnership with Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (Social Science One) as evidence that they are making data available to researchers [ 19 ]. While this partnership is one step in the right direction, there are several problems with this model:

The data are extremely limited. At the moment it consists solely of web page addresses that have been shared on Facebook for 18 months from 2017 to 2019.

Researchers have to apply for access to the data through Social Science One, which acts as a gatekeeper of the data.

If approved, researchers have to execute an agreement directly with Facebook.

This is not an open, scientific process. It is, rather, a process that empowers administrators to cherry-pick research projects that favor their perspective. If Facebook was serious about facilitating academic research, they would provide far greater access to, availability of, and insight into the data. There are legitimate privacy concerns around releasing data, but there are far better ways to address those concerns while fostering open, vibrant research.

3 Does Facebook cause polarization?

LeCun cited a single study as evidence that Facebook does not cause polarization. But do the findings of this study support Mr. LeCun’s claims?

The study concludes that “polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media.” The study does not, however, actually measure this type of polarization directly. Its primary data-gathering instrument—a survey on polarization—did not ask whether respondents were on the Internet or if they used social media. Instead, the study estimates whether an individual respondent is likely to be on the Internet based on an index of demographic factors which suggest “predicted” Internet use. As explained in the study, “the main predictor [they] focus on is age” [ 23 ]. Age is estimated to be negatively correlated with social media usage. Therefore, since older people are also shown to be more politically polarized, LeCun takes this as evidence that social media use does not cause polarization.

This assumption of causality is flawed. The study does not point to a causal relationship between these demographic factors and social media use. It simply says that these demographic factors drive polarization. Whether these factors have a correlational or causative relationship with the Internet and social media use is complete conjecture. The author of the study himself caveats any such conclusions, noting that “[t]hese findings do not rule out any effect of the internet or social media on political polarization.” [ 5 ].

Not only is LeCun’s assumption flawed, it is directly refuted by a recent Pew Research study [ 3 ] that found an overwhelmingly high percentage of US adults age 65 + are on Facebook (50%), the most of any social network. If anything, older age is actually more clearly correlated with Facebook use relative to other social networks.

Moreover, in 2020, the MIS Quarterly journal published a study by Steven L. Johnson, et al. that explored this problem and found that the “more time someone spends on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes. This evidence suggests Facebook indeed serves as an echo chamber especially for its conservative users” [ 24 ].

Allcott, et al. also explores this question in “The Welfare Effects of Social Media” in November, 2019, beginning with a review of other studies confirming a relationship between social media use, well-being and political polarization [ 1 ]:

More recent discussion has focused on an array of possible negative impacts. At the individual level, many have pointed to negative correlations between intensive social media use and both subjective well-being and mental health. Adverse outcomes such as suicide and depression appear to have risen sharply over the same period that the use of smartphones and social media has expanded. Alter (2018) and Newport (2019), along with other academics and prominent Silicon Valley executives in the “time well-spent” movement, argue that digital media devices and social media apps are harmful and addictive. At the broader social level, concern has focused particularly on a range of negative political externalities. Social media may create ideological “echo chambers” among like-minded friend groups, thereby increasing political polarization (Sunstein 2001, 2017; Settle 2018). Furthermore, social media are the primary channel through which misinformation spreads online (Allcott and Gentzkow 2017), and there is concern that coordinated disinformation campaigns can affect elections in the US and abroad.

Allcott’s 2019 study uses a randomized experiment in the run-up to the November 2018 midterm elections to examine how Facebook affects several individual and social welfare measures. They found that:

deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (1) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (2) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (3) increased subjective well-being; and (4) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.

In other words, not using Facebook for a month made you happier and resulted in less future usage. In fact, they say that “deactivation significantly reduced polarization of views on policy issues and a measure of exposure to polarizing news.” None of these findings would come as a surprise to anybody who works at Facebook.

“A former Facebook AI researcher” confirmed that they ran “‘study after study’ confirming the same basic idea: models that maximize engagement increase polarization” [ 21 ]. Not only did Facebook know this, but they continued to design and build their recommendation algorithms to maximize user engagement, knowing that this meant optimizing for extremism and polarization. Footnote 4

Facebook understood what they were building according to Tim Kendall’s Congressional testimony in 2020. He explained that “we sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible and turn [sic] into historically unprecedented profits” [ 38 ]. He went on to explain that their inspiration was “Big Tobacco’s playbook … to make our offering addictive at the outset.” They quickly figured out that “extreme, incendiary content” directly translated into “unprecedented engagement—and profits.” He was the director of monetization for Facebook—few would have been better positioned to understand Facebook’s motivations, findings and strategy.

4 Engagement, filter bubbles, and executive compensation

The term “filter bubble” was coined by Eli Pariser who wrote a book with that title, exploring how social media algorithms are designed to increase engagement and create echo chambers where inflammatory posts are more likely to go viral. Filter bubbles are not just an algorithmic outcome; often we filter our own lives, surrounding ourselves with friends (online and offline) who are more likely to agree with our philosophical, religious and political views.

Social media platforms capitalize on our natural tendency toward filtered engagement. These platforms build algorithms, and structure executive compensation, [ 27 ] to maximize such engagement. By their very design, social media curation and recommendation algorithms are engineered to maximize engagement, and thus, are predisposed to create filter bubbles.

Facebook has long attracted criticism for its pursuit of growth at all costs. A recent profile of Facebook’s AI efforts details the difficulty of getting “buy-in or financial support when the work did not directly improve Facebook’s growth.” [ 21 ]. Andrew Bosworth, a Vice President at Facebook said in a 2016 memo that nothing matters but growth, and that “all the work we do in growth is justified” regardless of whether “it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies” or if “somebody dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools” [ 31 ].

Bosworth and Zuckerberg went on to claim [ 36 ] that the shocking memo was merely an attempt at being provocative. Certainly, it succeeded in this aim. But what else could they really say? It’s not a great look. And it looks even worse when you consider that Facebook’s top brass really do get paid more when these things happen. The above-referenced report is based on interviews with multiple former product managers at Facebook, and shows that their executive compensation system is largely based around their most important metric–user engagement. This creates a perverse incentive. And clearly, by their own admission, Facebook will not allow a few casualties to get in the way of their executive compensation.

5 Is it incidental or intentional?

Yaël Eisenstat, a former CIA analyst who specialized in counter-extremism went on to work at Facebook out of concern that the social media platform was increasing radicalization and political polarization. She explained in a TED talk [ 13 ] that the current information ecosystem is manipulating its users, and that “social media companies like Facebook profit off of segmenting us and feeding us personalized content that both validates and exploits our biases. Their bottom line depends on provoking a strong emotion to keep us engaged, often incentivizing the most inflammatory and polarizing voices.” This emotional response results in more than just engagement—it results in addiction.

Eisenstat joined Facebook in 2018 and began to explore the issues which were most divisive on the social media platform. She began asking questions internally about what was causing this divisiveness. She found that “the largest social media companies are antithetical to the concept of reasoned discourse … Lies are more engaging online than truth, and salaciousness beats out wonky, fact-based reasoning in a world optimized for frictionless virality. As long as algorithms’ goals are to keep us engaged, they will continue to feed us the poison that plays to our worst instincts and human weaknesses.”

She equated Facebook’s algorithmic manipulation to the tactics that terrorist recruiters use on vulnerable youth. She offered Facebook a plan to combat political disinformation and voter suppression. She has claimed that the plan was rejected, and Eisenstat left after just six months.

As noted earlier, LeCun flatly denies [ 34 ] that Facebook creates filter bubbles that drive polarization. In sharp contrast, Eisenstat explains that such an outcome is a feature of their algorithm, not a bug. The Wall St. Journal reported that in 2018, senior executives at Facebook were informed of the following conclusions during an internal presentation [ 22 ]:

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness… [and] if left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.”

The platform aggravates polarization and tribal behavior.

Some proposed algorithmic changes would “disproportionately affect[] conservative users and publishers.”

Looking at data for Germany, an internal report found “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools … Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

These are Facebook’s own words, and arguably, they provide the social media platform with an invaluable set of marketing prerogatives. They are reinforced by Tim Kendall’s testimony as discussed above.

“Most notably,” reported the WSJ, “the project forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized ‘user engagement’—a metric involving time spent, likes, shares and comments that for years had been the lodestar of its system.” As noted in the section above, executive compensation was tied to “user engagement,” which meant product developers at Facebook were incentivized to design systems in this very way. Footnote 5

Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan reportedly [ 22 ] dismissed the conclusions from the 2018 presentation, calling efforts to bring greater civility to conversations on the social media platform “paternalistic.” Zuckerberg went on to say that he would “stand up against those who say that new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us.” Kaplan reportedly “killed efforts to build a classification system for hyperpolarized content.” Failing to address this has resulted in algorithms that, as Tim Kendall explained, “have brought out the worst in us. They have literally rewired our brains so that we are detached from reality and immersed in tribalism” [ 38 ].

Facebook would have us believe that it has made great strides in confronting these problems over just the last two years, as Mr. LeCun has claimed. But at present, the burden of proof is on Facebook to produce the full, raw data so that independent researchers can make a fair assessment of his claims.

6 The AI filter

According to LeCun’s tweets cited at the beginning of this paper, Facebook’s AI-powered filter cleanses the platform of:

Disinformation that endangers public safety or the integrity of the democratic process

These are his words, so we will refer to them even while the actual definitions of hate speech, calls to violence, and other terms are potentially controversial and open to debate.

These claims are provably false. While “AI” (along with some very large, manual curation operations in developing countries) may effectively filter some of this content, at Facebook’s scale, some is not enough.

Let’s examine the claims a little closer.

6.1 Does Facebook actually filter out hate speech?

An investigation by the UK-based counter-extremist organization ISD (Institute for Strategic Dialog) found that Facebook’s algorithm “actively promotes” Holocaust denial content [ 20 ]. The same organization, in another report, documents how Facebook’s “delays or mistakes in policy enforcement continue to enable hateful and harmful content to spread through paid targeted ads.” [ 17 ]. They go on to explain that “[e]ven when action is taken on violating ad content, such a response is often reactive and delayed, after hundreds, thousands, or potentially even millions of users have already been served those ads on their feeds.” Footnote 6

Zuckerberg admitted in April 2018 that hate speech in Myanmar was a problem, and pledged to act. Four months later, Reuters found more than “1000 examples of posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook” [ 45 ]. As recently as June 2020 there were reports [ 7 ] of troll farms using Facebook to intimidate opponents of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines with death threats and hateful comments.

6.2 Does Facebook actually filter out calls to violence?

The Sri Lankan government had to block access to Facebook “amid a wave of violence against Muslims … after Facebook ignored years of calls from both the government and civil society groups to control ethnonationalist accounts that spread hate speech and incited violence.” [ 42 ] A report from the Center for Policy Alternatives in September 2014 detailed evidence of 20 hate groups in Sri Lanka, and informed Facebook. In March of 2018, Buzzfeed reported that “16 out of the 20 groups were still on Facebook”. Footnote 7

When former President Trump tweeted, in response to Black Lives Matters protests, when “the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the message was liked and shared hundreds of thousands of times across Facebook and Instagram, even as other social networks such as Twitter flagged the message for its explicit incitement of violence [ 48 ] and prevented it from being retweeted.

Facebook played a pivotal role in the planning of the January 6th insurrection in the US, providing an unchecked platform for proliferation of the Big Lie, radicalization around this lie, and coordinated organization around explicitly-stated plans to engage in violent confrontation at the nation’s capital on the outgoing president’s behalf. Facebook’s role in the deadly violence was far greater and more widespread than the role of Parler and the other fringe right-wing platforms that attracted so much attention in the aftermath of the attack [ 11 ].

6.3 Does Facebook actually filter out cyberbullying?

According to Enough Is Enough, a non-partisan, non-profit organization whose mission is “making the Internet safer for children and families,” the answer is a resounding no. According to their most recent cyberbullying statistics, [ 10 ] 47% of young people have been bullied online, and the two most prevalent platforms are Instagram at 42% and Facebook at 37%.

In fact, Facebook is failing to protect children on a global scale. According to a UNICEF poll of children in 30 countries, one in every three young people says that they have been victimized by cyberbullying. And one in five says the harassment and threat of actual violence caused them to skip school. According to the survey, conducted in concert with the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) on Violence against Children, “almost three-quarters of young people also said social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, are the most common place for online bullying” [ 49 ].

6.4 Does Facebook actually filter out “disinformation that endangers public safety or the integrity of the democratic process?”

To list the evidence contradicting this point would be exhausting. Below are just a few examples:

The Computational Propaganda Research Project found in their 2019 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation that 70 countries had disinformation campaigns organized on social media in 2019, with Facebook as the top platform [ 6 ].

A Facebook whistleblower produced a 6600 word memo detailing case after case of Facebook “abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe.” [ 44 ]

Facebook is ground-zero for anti-vaccination and pandemic misinformation, with the 26-min conspiracy theory film “Plandemic” going viral on Facebook in April 2020 and garnering tens of millions of views. Facebook’s attempt to purge itself of anti-vaccination disinformation was easily thwarted when the groups guilty of proliferating this content removed the word “vaccine” from their names. In addition to undermining public health interests by spreading provably false content, these anti-vaccination groups have obscured meaningful discourse about the actual health concerns and risks that may or may not be connected to vaccinations. A paper from May 2020 attempts to map out the “multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals” [ 25 ] that are entangled with anti-vaccination clusters. That report predicts that such anti-vaccination views “will dominate in a decade” given their explosive growth and intertwining with undecided people. According to the Knight Foundation and Gallup, [ 26 ] 75% of Americans believe they “were exposed to misinformation about the election” on Facebook during the 2020 US presidential election. This is one of those rare issues on which Republicans (76%), Democrats (75%) and Independents (75%) agree–Facebook was the primary source for election misinformation.

If those AI filters are in fact working, they are not working very well.

All of this said, Facebook’s reliance on “AI filters” misses a critical point, which is that you cannot have AI ethics without ethics [ 30 ]. These problems cannot be solved with AI. These problems cannot be solved with checklists, incremental advances, marginal changes, or even state-of-the-art deep learning networks. These problems are caused by the company’s entire business model and mission. Bosworth’s provocative quotes above, along with Tim Kendall’s direct testimony demonstrate as much.

These are systemic issues, not technological ones. Yael Eisenstat put it best in her TED talk: “as long as the company continues to merely tinker around the margins of content policy and moderation, as opposed to considering how the entire machine is designed and monetized, they will never truly address how the platform is contributing to hatred, division and radicalization.”

7 Facebook does not want to be the arbiter of truth

We should probably take comfort in Facebook’s claim that it does not wish to be the “arbiter of political truth.” After all, Facebook has a troubled history with the truth. Their ad buying customers proved as much when Facebook was forced to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that they had inflated “by up to 900 percent—the time it said users spent watching videos.” [ 4 ] While Facebook would neither admit nor deny the truth of this allegation, they did admit to the error in a 2016 statement [ 14 ].

This was not some innocuous lie that just cost a few firms some money either. As Slate explained in a 2018 article, “many [publications] laid off writers and editors and cut back on text stories to focus on producing short, snappy videos for people to watch in their Facebook feeds.” [ 40 ] People lost their livelihoods to this deception.

Is this an isolated incident? Or is fraud at Facebook systemic? Matt Stoller describes the contents of recently unsealed legal documents [ 12 ] in a lawsuit alleging Facebook has defrauded advertisers for years [ 46 ]:

The documents revealed that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg directly oversaw the alleged fraud for years. The scheme was simple. Facebook deceived advertisers by pretending that fake accounts represented real people, because ad buyers choose to spend on ad campaigns based on where they think their customers are. Former employees noted that the corporation did not care about the accuracy of numbers as long as the ad money was coming in. Facebook, they said, “did not give a shit.” The inflated statistics sometimes led to outlandish results. For instance, Facebook told advertisers that its services had a potential reach of 100 million 18–34-year-olds in the United States, even though there are only 76 million people in that demographic. After employees proposed a fix to make the numbers honest, the corporation rejected the idea, noting that the “revenue impact” for Facebook would be “significant.” One Facebook employee wrote, “My question lately is: how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?” According to these documents, Sandberg aggressively managed public communications over how to talk to advertisers about the inflated statistics, and Facebook is now fighting against her being interviewed by lawyers in a class action lawsuit alleging fraud.

Facebook’s embrace of deception extends from its ad-buying fraud to the content on its platforms. For instance:

Those who would “aid[] and abet[] the spread of climate misinformation” on Facebook benefit from “a giant loophole in its fact-checking program.” Evidently, Facebook gives its staff the power to overrule climate scientists by deeming climate disinformation “opinion.” [ 2 ].

The former managing editor of Snopes reported that Facebook was merely using the well-regarded fact-checking site for “crisis PR,” that they did not take fact checking seriously and would ignore concerns [ 35 ]. Snopes tried hard to push against the Myanmar disinformation campaign, amongst many other issues, but its concerns were ignored.

ProPublica recently reported [ 18 ] that Sheryl Sandberg silenced and censored a Kurdish militia group that “the Turkish government had targeted” in order to safeguard their revenue from Turkey.

Mark Zuckerberg and Joel Kaplan intervened [ 37 ] in April 2019 to keep Alex Jones on the platform, despite the right-wing conspiracy theorist’s lead role in spreading disinformation about the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting and the 2018 Parkland high school shooting.

Arguably, Facebook’s executive team has not only ceded responsibility as an “arbiter of truth,” but has also on several notable occasions, intervened to ensure the continued proliferation of disinformation.

8 How do we disengage?

Facebook’s business model is focused entirely on increasing growth and user engagement. Its algorithms are extremely effective at doing so. The steps Facebook has taken, such as building “AI filters” or partnering with independent fact checkers, are superficial and toothless. They cannot begin to untangle the systemic issues at the heart of this matter, because these issues are Facebook’s entire reason for being.

So what can be done? Certainly, criminality needs to be prosecuted. Executives should go to jail for fraud. Social media companies, and their organizational leaders, should face legal liability for the impact made by the content on their platforms. One effort to impose legal liability in the US is centered around reforming section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. It, and similar laws around the world, should be reformed to create far more meaningful accountability and liability for the promotion of disinformation, violence, and extremism.

Most importantly, monopolies should be busted. Existing antitrust laws should be used to break up Facebook and restrict its future activities and acquisitions.

The matters outlined here have been brought to the attention of Facebook’s leadership in countless ways that are well documented and readily provable. But the changes required go well beyond effective leveraging of AI. At its heart, Facebook will not change because they do not want to, and are not incentivized to. Facebook must be regulated, and Facebook’s leadership structure must be dismantled.

It seems unlikely that politicians and regulators have the political will to do all of this, but there are some encouraging signs, especially regarding antitrust investigations [ 9 ] and lawsuits [ 28 ] in both the US and Europe. Still, this issue goes well beyond mere enforcement. Somehow we must shift the incentives for social media companies, who compete for, and monetize, our attention. Until we stop rewarding Facebook’s illicit behavior with engagement, it’s hard to see a way out of our current condition. These companies are building technology that is designed to draw us in with problematic content, addict us to outrage, and ultimately drive us apart. We no longer agree on shared facts or truths, a condition that is turning political adversaries into bitter enemies, that is transforming ideological difference into seething contempt. Rather than help us lead more fulfilling lives or find truth, Facebook is helping us to discover enemies among our fellow citizens, and bombarding us with reasons to hate them, all to the end of profitability. This path is unsustainable.

The only thing Facebook truly understands is money, and all of their money comes from engagement. If we disengage, they lose money. If we delete, they lose power. If we decline to be a part of their ecosystem, perhaps we can collectively return to a shared reality.

Facebook executives have, themselves, acknowledged that Facebook profits from the spread of misinformation: https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-misinformation-and-false-news .

Cybersecurity for Democracy. (March 3, 2021). “Far-right news sources on Facebook more engaging.” https://medium.com/cybersecurity-for-democracy/far-right-news-sources-on-facebook-more-engaging-e04a01efae90 .

Facebook claims to have since broadened the metrics it uses to calculate executive pay, but to what extent this might offset the prime directive of maximizing user engagement is unclear.

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The White House 45 Archived [@WhiteHouse45]: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!” [Tweet]. Twitter. (2020) https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse45/status/1266342941649506304

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Top 20 Facebook Interview Questions (Example Answers Included)

Mike Simpson 0 Comments

facebook case study questions

By Mike Simpson

Facebook is a social media giant and tech powerhouse. A shocking 2.6 billion people use the platform, outpacing every other social media site significantly.

That’s what makes working at Facebook so enticing. The platform is part of so many people’s lives, which could make your work incredibly impactful. Plus, it could mean a chance to be at the cutting-edge of technology. How can you become a part of that world? By nailing your Facebook interview questions, of course.

But how do you bend those Facebook questions to your will? Well, with a bit of preparation and planning. That way, you can set yourself up for success.

Don’t know where to begin? Don’t worry! We’ve got your back. If working at Facebook is your dream, we can help you achieve it. Let’s get started.

How to Answer Facebook Interview Questions

Before we dig into the Facebook interview questions, let’s take a second to discuss strategy.

Because Facebook has some incredibly stringent rules about applying for a job there, and you want to make the most of every opportunity.

For example, you’re limited to three job applications. Additionally, i f you aren’t selected, Facebook wants you to wait one year before you try again. That’s a pretty long time.

But don’t panic. You can prepare for many of the Facebook questions you’ll face during the interview, increasing the odds that you’ll shine.

First, you’ve probably heard about those off-the-wall questions tech giants used to screen candidates. Many job seekers worry about dealing with those challenging brainteaser questions. But the real question is, should you?

Luckily, the answer is no. They aren’t as common as you’d expect. At least, not today. Some evidence came out showing that the obscure brainteasers don’t actually lead to better hiring. So, most companies abandoned them.

With that out of the way, let’s cover what you want to showcase when you answer Facebook interview questions. Precisely what you want to discuss varies depending on the position you want to land. Facebook, after all, is a massive company. It hires for all kinds of niches, including technology, operations , and administrative , just to name a few.

Highlighting critical traits – like organization , accountability , and attention to detail – is always a smart move. Additionally, if you aren’t interviewing for a technology role, make sure you come across as tech-savvy. After all, Facebook is a technology company at its core, so it’s a good idea to show that you’d fit into that environment.

Additionally, do a bit of research before you head into your Facebook interview. Read the job description and review every usable tidbit of information you can find. That gives you some clues about the kinds of job interview questions you may face.

Then, spend a little time reviewing Facebook’s mission and values statements. Those give you insights into the company’s culture and priorities, while also helping you figure out the traits you need to highlight.

Okay, but what about those tricky Facebook behavioral interview questions ? How do you handle a question that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer?

For those, the key is adopting a solid strategy. If you take the STAR Method and the Tailoring Method , together, you’ve got a winning formula. You can craft enticing, engaging responses, ensuring you make the best impression possible during your interview.

We also wanted to let you know that we created an amazing free cheat sheet that will give you word-for-word answers for some of the toughest interview questions you are going to face in your upcoming interview. After all, hiring managers will often ask you more generalized interview questions along with their Facebook specific questions!

Click below to get your free PDF now:

Get Our Job Interview Questions & Answers Cheat Sheet!

FREE BONUS PDF CHEAT SHEET: Get our " Job Interview Questions & Answers PDF Cheat Sheet " that gives you " word-word sample answers to the most common job interview questions you'll face at your next interview .

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Top 3 Facebook Interview Questions

Okay, now you have a general idea of how to answer the Facebook questions. That means it’s time for examples.

Now, it’s important to remember that Facebook hires for all kinds of jobs. Not all questions are relevant to every role. For example, you wouldn’t expect an accounts payable candidate to answer the same questions a data analyst does, right? Of course not.

But that doesn’t mean some questions aren’t fairly common. Here’s a look at the top three Facebook interview questions, along with example answers.

1. Describe the personality of a manager who you’d never want to work for.

Not everyone appreciates the same management style. Employees thrive under different conditions, and many hiring managers want to find out the circumstances that allow a candidate to shine, as well as what holds them back.

This question focuses a bit more on the latter. The hiring manager wants to learn about management styles that don’t meet your needs. That way, they can determine if you’d excel as part of the team.

EXAMPLE ANSWER :

“Generally, I’m pretty adaptable. However, I think I would struggle if I were working for a manager that didn’t provide constructive feedback. I believe that feedback is an opportunity to learn and grow, but it can only serve that function if it is actionable and can help me enhance my capabilities. As a result, a manager that prefers to berate over being supportive is not ideal for me.”

2. Are there any duties you absolutely hate doing?

This question can feel a little bit tricky. After all, saying that you don’t like certain tasks doesn’t seem like a good idea.

But that doesn’t mean you can tackle this question tactfully. The trick is to be honest, but then to pivot, focusing on the steps you take to remain engaged even when you don’t love a particular responsibility.

“Generally, I don’t enjoy highly repetitive tasks. However, I realize that there are many instances where that’s unavoidable. As a result, I developed a system that allows me to remain engaged. After working on a repetitive task for a period, I transition over to a different duty for a time. This gives me a mental break from the less-engaging activity while ensuring I remain productive. Then, I switch back, allowing to me return with renewed vigor and focus.”

3. Are you able to remain productive while working from home?

Recently, Facebook extended it’s work-from-home policy, essentially preventing any employee from working from the office until July 2021 . Plus, many of those working at Facebook are allowed to telecommute permanently, even with the offices reopen.

Since working remotely is going to be the norm for some time (if not forever), hiring managers want to make sure candidates can excel without direct in-person oversight.

“Yes, I feel that I am capable of not just remaining productive but exceeding expectations while working remotely. I set myself up for success by making the most of a range of tools. For example, to support organization and time management, I use a calendaring app to structure my workday. Additionally, I have a quiet space from which to work, ensuring I can focus, and take active steps to limit distractions, such as turning off unnecessary notifications. I’m also highly tech-savvy and adapt quickly to remote work solutions like collaboration software and VPN connection services. I believe that, together, that ensures I can remain productive.”

17 More Facebook Interview Questions

Here are 17 more Facebook interview questions you need to be ready for, depending on the role you want to land:

  • Why do you want to work for Facebook?
  • Why are you looking for new job opportunities?
  • If you had a chance to ask Mark Zuckerberg anything, what would you ask? Why would you choose that question?
  • How would your last manager describe you? What about your past colleagues?
  • Imagine your best possible workday. What did you do during that day? Why was it amazing?
  • If you were given a set of words, how would you calculate the average number of letters in the words?
  • Facebook has restrictions for users under the age of 13. How would you go about identifying users younger than 13?
  • Do you prefer to work as part of a team or independently?
  • Describe the use of hashtags on Facebook, as well as how they can be abused.
  • Tell me about a time you worked as part of a cross-functional team.
  • How would you recommend combating hate speech on social media?
  • If you were given a new product, how would you define the target market and position the product for success?
  • What is the most challenging problem you ever had to solve at work?
  • Describe your proudest achievement. What about your biggest defeat?
  • Which of your traits will make you a strong team leader? Why?
  • Have you ever managed a large-scale project before? Tell me about it.
  • How would you improve Facebook notifications if you could make any changes you wanted?

5 Good Questions to Ask at the End of a Facebook Interview

As you get to the end of your Facebook interview questions, you usually get a chance to ask the hiring manager a few of your own . You need to view this as an opportunity. You’re getting a chance to learn about nuances of the job that aren’t discussed in the listing, and that’s a big deal.

Plus, asking questions makes you look engaged and excited about the role. That’s important!

While you can definitely ask any questions that happen to come to mind as you’re interviewing, having a few options tucked away in your back pocket is a great idea. If you don’t know what to ask, give these five questions a try at the end of your Facebook interview :

  • What does a typical day in this job look like?
  • How is success defined for this role?
  • Did anything about working at Facebook surprise you when you first started?
  • Are there opportunities for growth and advancement in this position?
  • What is your favorite part about working at Facebook?

Putting It All Together

Ultimately, many professionals consider a chance to work at Facebook to be a dream come true. By nailing your Facebook interview questions, you can join the company’s ranks, doing your part to influence and alter the social media and technology fields. Use all of the information above to ensure you’re up to the challenge.

Remember, if you weren’t a great candidate, you wouldn’t have landed an interview. Show the hiring manager you’d be an exceptional addition to the team, and your dream of working at Facebook might become a reality.

Good luck!!

FREE : Job Interview Questions & Answers PDF Cheat Sheet!

Download our " Job Interview Questions & Answers PDF Cheat Sheet " that gives you word-for-word sample answers to some of the most common interview questions including:

  • What Is Your Greatest Weakness?
  • What Is Your Greatest Strength?
  • Tell Me About Yourself
  • Why Should We Hire You?

Click Here To Get The Job Interview Questions & Answers Cheat Sheet

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Co-Founder and CEO of TheInterviewGuys.com. Mike is a job interview and career expert and the head writer at TheInterviewGuys.com.

His advice and insights have been shared and featured by publications such as Forbes , Entrepreneur , CNBC and more as well as educational institutions such as the University of Michigan , Penn State , Northeastern and others.

Learn more about The Interview Guys on our About Us page .

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facebook case study questions

facebook case study questions

11 Amazing Facebook Marketing Case Studies

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Even though Facebook still seems to be first on the mind of many people thinking about social media marketing – Facebook is not easy to master. But there are multiple Facebook marketing case studies out there that prove that success can still be found with Facebook.

Sure, you can buy visibility fairly cheap, you can shout your offers at a (hopefully) targeted audience. But to get your share of Facebook’s marketing and branding superpowers you have to understand how the social network Facebook works. You need to figure out what your target audience likes – and you have to find the trigger to make them engage with your updates.

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 13.43.15

Image Source: Sprout Social

Before you read on - we have various resources that show you exactly how to use social networks to gain massive traffic and leads. For instance, check out the following:

If you are not going to spend thousands of dollars on advertising that gets even harder – and the more important, it is to understand how it all works.

A wider reach for a post on a Facebook fanpage may become harder to get, but there are still some formats and types of updates on Facebook that can reach far.

While many Facebook users complain that their reach dropped, most of them do not (yet) utilize the fairly new features that Facebook offers that will not only help to increase engagement but also help to uphold or even grow the reach. And I am not talking all about advertising.

No matter what you do on Facebook, a key goal for your marketing updates should be engagement. And that is for more than one reason:

  • Engagement is an important factor that decides how well your posts is received by the Facebook algorithm.
  • Engagement also helps to build a relationship and convert more leads and customers.

Brands who are looking for Facebook marketing success need to be aware of what works and what their audience may like. There are some types of posts that on average fare far better than others – and successful brands consider this.

facebook case study questions

Image Source: BuzzSumo

Video by far outperforms all other types of Facebook post formats. In fact, videos get 59% more engagement than any other types of post. Video even performs better than photos.

But there is another type of post or rather a place to post that can outperform what you have been doing on Facebook in the past: Facebook groups.

Hey, before you read on - we have in various FREE in-depth guides on similar topics that you can download. For this post, check out:

Marketers view private community groups as one of the major trends in social marketing. That should be reason enough for you to take a closer look at Facebook groups if you have not done so in the past. We added some Facebook marketing case studies to this list that feature Facebook groups as the main focus.

But you don’t have to take my word for the possibilities you have with your Facebook marketing. There are more than enough examples of brands that are hitting it big-time on Facebook.

to get your share of Facebook’s marketing and branding superpowers you have to understand how the social network Facebook works. Here are 6 brands and their case studies to show you how you can use Facebook for your business. #facebook #facebooktips #socialmediamarketing #socialmediatips #facebookexamples #facebookmarketing

Here are 11 examples of brands that win big with their Facebook marketing. Even if your situation is different, your budget not even worth mentioning and your existing fanbase a fraction of the brands in question – you can still learn from these amazing Facebook marketing case studies how to leverage the Facebook audience!

1. Starbucks – Case Study for Facebook Groups

The first Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte was sold in a test campaign in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada, and Washington, D.C. in 2003. It was an instant success. In the fall of 2004, the drink was rolled out nationwide. It is said that Starbucks made more than 1.4 billion $ just off this drink .

The pumpkin spice latte remains a seasonal drink to this day – and is eagerly awaited for fall 2020.

But what has Pumpkin Spice Latte to do with Facebook marketing? A lot.

In 2018 Starbucks launched a Facebook group for Pumpkin Spice Latte. The group is called “Leaf Rakers Society.” It is a group to celebrate fall – remember, the Pumpkin Spice Latte is a seasonal drink that can only be bought at Starbucks in fall…

Facebook group leaf rakers society startbucks

The number one reason for Starbucks’ social media team for starting this group may have been the shift in the algorithm on Facebook. That shift meant that brands needed to focus on engagement and meaningful interaction instead of just posting. And for many brands that meant a new strategy that focused more on the Facebook group than on Facebook fanpages.

For Starbucks this group had more benefits:

  • for their seasonal drink, this group kept the love and excitement alive all-year-long.
  • They do not post, they do not have to be active. The group members keep the group alive.
  • They do not have to spend a dime in advertising – the popular topic allows them to do brand building based on member activity.

facebook case study questions

  • Listening to their customers who keep talking about beveryge recepies and Starbucks products they get valuable insights into what their audience loves or hates, how they can improve – and maybe even get new ideas for the nest super product to sell
  • All considered, the Facebook group for pumpkin spice latte lovers seems to do the trick for Starbucks.

2. Tomcat – Facebook Video Case Study

Facebook video and Facebook live video may sound a little intimidating and scary. So much may go wrong. And if it goes wrong everybody can see it.

But with a little creativity and some additional boost, there are awesome marketing results on the line.

So how about Halloween, mice, and a horror movie that develops as the audience comments on the video? This is an extraordinary example of creative content marketing utilizing one of the major trends in social media.

Tomcat is a company that focuses on rodent extermination. For Halloween 2016 they created a live video event featuring some mice in a haunted cabin. At some points in the story, the audience was asked how the story should develop: Which of the mice should die next and how should it be killed.

The video got 2.3 million unique views and an insane amount of 21% of viewers actively participated. the fanbase of the Tomcat Facebook page grew by 58%.

Tomcat – Facebook Not Live from Jesse Brown on Vimeo .

3. BuzzFeed -Facebook Live dance battle

This is another example of how brands can use Facebook live to engage with their audience and build brand awareness.

You probably all know BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed used Facebook live to host an interactive dance battle called “Dance Craze Battle: Live” that asked the audience to vote on the performance of the dancers via the comments.

But they asked for even more engagement.

Instead of following a predefined schedule and guideline for the moves to be performed, they asked the audience to suggest dance moves that the dancers had to perform. And the audience complied, making the dancers perform things like “the crying college student.”

Between rounds, Buzzfeed took the opportunity to talk to the contestants and make their team more human.

In the second round of the battle, the viewers could see how the dancers performed their suggestions.

The engagement on the live videos helped keep the audience interested.

4. Hubspot – Facebook group example

In March 2020 the inbound marketing company Hubspot created a Facebook group for Marketers called Marketer to Marketer.

Facebook group hubspot marketers to marketers

As with the Starbucks Facebook group for fall lovers, the Hubspot group is NOT a group to market Hubspot products. It is also not a Hubspot support group.

In fact, the group description explicitly states that the group is not monitored by the Hubspot support team.

Hubspot answers the why to the Facebook Group themselves : To build a community around their target group (=marketers.) Plus, since the reach for Facebook posts steadily declines they needed a new way of increasing engagement around their brand and product.

The impact of the group? Hubspot has close to 2 Mio followers on their Facebook fanpage. The group has just over 3200 members. The difference is too large to measure the impact of the group on Facebook engagement, reach or traffic.

However, they get direct access to members from their target group. They can interact and engage and earn valuable insights into the questions and topics on the mind of their marketing audience.

The Hubspot Facebook group is still very young but it already turned into a self-sustaining community. But it still needs ongoing promotion to keep it growing and prospering.

5. Real Estate – a Local Facebook Marketing Case Study

Looking at the other case studies, you may get the impression that you have to be a global player with a huge budget to utilize Facebook marketing. That is why I added this case study about a real estate company that wanted to increase local leads.

For this they used lead generation ads – this type of ad on Facebook already includes a contact form for which you can choose the questions to add.

The agency case study tells that the campaign generated 370 local leads in 90 days . Each lead cost 6,77$ on average.

Before you jump on the Facebook advertising train, please note that the case study does not disclose any ROI or value for the lead. I have no proof whatsoever that any dollar was ever earned with these leads.

And that is a major problem with lead generation on Facebook and you need to measure your results carefully: Leads need to make you money otherwise you will be on a straight path to bankruptcy as you pay for each lead in hard money.

Sure, Nike has a corporate page on Facebook . But Nike has so much more. They have specialized Fanpages for various sports like basketball, football, running, tennis, etc. Also, Nike has some pages for activity like the Nike+ Run Club. They have Nike Women. Plus they have several accounts for various products.

Why are they splitting up their marketing power this way?

Because it lets them target their audience much better. They can provide more value to the people. The sports channels give you news from your favorite sports without annoying half the audience with news from sports they are not interested in.

I have been part of the running initiative a while back when Nike had Women’s runs in various cities including my home town Berlin. These runs were perfectly organized inbound marketing campaigns that encouraged the participants to share photos and videos from the event all over social media. Nike even provided several on-location photo booths to make sure there where thousands of branded photos being passed around social media. And sure I was a fan of the related Fanpage eager awaiting updates on the next run.

With all these accounts – what is Nike talking about all day? What is their content strategy? Not their products – or not only their products. Nike products have a minor role in all this branding effort. No need to be overly promotional. A large number of updates is about news from sports or athletes that still builds brand awareness.

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 11.40.09

Image Source NikeCourt on Facebook

Note: Nike can be viewed as a case study from the past. Most of their Facebook pages are not updated anymore. They have gone on another marketing path.

7. TOMS One-For-One Strategy

Image Source: TOMS on Facebook

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 11.52.44

This strategy gives a lot of possibilities for stories to tell – each product in itself is a call-to-action to do something good. And this type of marketing campaign works on Facebook. They can announce new partnerships and products – people will like them and allow leveraging the good deed that is always included.

8. State Bicycle

Maybe it is because I am into sports myself – I love how State Bicycle work their Facebook page: Sure they have product updates. They also have announcements for races and news from the biking world.

What really gets their engagement going is their content strategy of photo contests, photo shoots and photos they share.

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 12.11.11

Image source: State Bicycle on Facebook

Here are 6 examples of brands that win big with their Facebook marketing. Even if your situation is different, you can still learn from these amazing Facebook marketing case studies how to leverage the Facebook audience! #facebook #facebookexamples #facebookmarketing #facebooktips #socialmedia #socialmediatips #socialmediamarketing

9. Tough Mudder

I am not so sure whether I first heard about Tough Mudder from friends – or if I first saw an ad from them on Facebook. Maybe it is because I know people who participated, or because Jonathan may take part one day. But they surely caught my attention on Facebook.

Tough Mudder is an obstacle course challenge that takes place all over the world. And they rock Facebook.

They are using several country accounts besides the main Facebook Fanpage .

They post a mixture of videos, images, and articles around the tough mudder races. Of course, they have the huge advantage of video footage directly from the challenges. And these videos surely get a ton of engagement – who does not admire those tough mudders?

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 13.54.48

Image Source: Tough Mudder on Facebook

Also, they use Facebook advertising – as said before, I saw those ads multiple times. And maybe one day I will dare to go for one of the challenges… Let me first finish the Berlin Marathon in September 🙂

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 12.58.41

Image Source: Tough Mudder Marketing Case Study

ToughMudder also uses Facebook video and Facebook live to cover its events. Since the Corona pandemic, there have not been any ToughMudder events but you can find some of the past videos.

They not only cover events but also live stream bootcamps.

facebook case study questions

10. FitBit – Facebook marketing case study

This is more an example of a content marketing strategy with the aid of Facebook. FitBit mainly shares their own blog posts on their Facebook fanpage. And they manage to get high engagement. Nothing going viral but solid likes and shares.

Bildschirmfoto 2017-02-16 um 13.15.27

Image source: FitBit on Facebook

to get your share of Facebook’s marketing and branding superpowers you have to understand how the social network Facebook works. Here are 6 Facebook marketing case studies that you can learn from. #facebook #facebooktips #facebookexamples #facebookmarketing #socialmedia #socialmediatips #socialmediamarketing #socialmediaexamples

They do not concentrate on their products. They share posts from the FitBit blog that cover everything fitness and healthy living related. And that topic simply rocks on Facebook.

facebook case study questions

Whenever a fan shares a story or personal experience in the comments, FitBit is there to comment and appreciate the openness.

That kind of interaction scores high with fans.

Fitbit also added videos to their Facebook strategy. They now post Facebook videos on a regular basis.

11. Always #LikeAGirl

Always offers sanitary products for women, and in 2014 they decided to change the meaning of #likeagirl. At the center of their campaign was this powerful video.

Facebook is not easy to master for social media marketing success. Here are 6 Facebook marketing case studies for you to learn from and get inspiration

Final Words about Facebook marketing case studies

While Facebook isn’t up front on the list of hottest marketing trends, there are still thousands of brands successful on Facebook. And not all of them base their success solely on the size of their advertising budget. They succeed because they understand how Facebook works – and what their audience on Facebook wants and likes.

The biggest trend – and probably your biggest chance for marketing success without breaking the bank – currently are Facebook groups and Facebook video or rather Facebook live. That is why we added some Facebook marketing case studies that focus on Facebook groups and Facebook videos.

Before you jump into Facebook marketing and spend thousands on advertising because you read somewhere that Facebook marketing can only be successful if you pay for it – take a close look at some of these case studies and figure out what really makes them successful. It is the content they use, the engagement they drive, and fit between their updates and their target audience. Once, you understood what works for others figure out which marketing tactics resonate with your audience!

That is what Facebook marketing success is based on!

Are you dreaming of online success? You need traffic to your blog or website!

Getting free traffic from social media is absolutely possible. You just need to know what you have to do.

Here is the process that works for (almost) any niche and has the power to bring you huge amounts of traffic. We used these exact tactics to grow our first business to over 500k pageviews (wow – that was a ride!). We also used these tactics to get 50k visitors just 6 months after starting a totally new blog.

Do you want to get the foolproof process in easy to follow action plans? Check out “ The Social Traffic Code !”

If you struggle with your traffic this is the answer: It was for us!

facebook case study questions

Susanna Gebauer

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facebook case study questions

Facebook Lead Ads: Best Practices and Case Studies

Tired of running Lead Ad campaigns on Facebook with little success? Maybe changing your approach will help.

People often complain that Facebook doesn’t offer quality leads. You might have heard that you either need to spend a lot of money on Facebook or turn to other platforms to get better leads.  But most of the times, generating low quality leads has nothing to do with the platform.

No platform can guarantee satisfactory results if a Lead Ad takes the wrong approach. And keep in mind that Facebook is still one of the best platforms to generate leads because of its massive user base and daily engagement rates. 

But the question is, how can you run effective lead generation campaigns on Facebook? 

For a start, we can learn from analysing some success stories with Facebook Lead Ads. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the best practices of Facebook Lead Ads and explore some case studies – plus reasons behind their success. By the end, you’ll have a clearer direction on how to run your campaign successfully.  

What makes a successful Facebook Lead Ad?

Facebook is a great platform to collect leads, but at the same time, it’s highly competitive. Therefore, generating leads successfully through Facebook Lead Ads requires more than just knowing how to create and publish an ad . Successful ads target the right people, attract them, and guide them through the process smoothly. 

However, it doesn’t take a lot of time and effort to learn and implement these practices in your lead ads. Here are the most important ones you should know.     

Targeting the right audience

Conveying the message to the right audience is the most important part of any promotional activity. It’s essential to ensure that your Lead Ad is targeting the right people. In order to do that, you’ll need to allocate some time to understand your audience, including their problems, preferences, and general profiles. This not only helps you during the ad creation step where you specify a target audience based on demographics, but also guides you in creating relatable and relevant messages. 

Using visually appealing design

As people scroll through the content really fast, your ad should have a wow factor that stops them from scrolling further. People only interact with visually appealing content. To capitalise on this, your ad creative should be attention-grabbing. It includes eye-catching images or videos and concise text that complements the visuals. High-quality graphics compiled with compelling ad copy can compel users to pause and consider your offer.

Simplifying your forms 

The goal of a Lead Ad is to generate leads. Though it sounds simple enough, there’s a catch: people are often reluctant to share their personal information. However, this hesitation can be mitigated by asking for only the most essential information. The less time and effort it requires to fill out the form, the more likely users will complete the form and click ‘Submit’.

Optimising ads for mobile 

With more than half of Facebook’s users accessing the platform from their mobile devices, you should want to optimise your ads for mobile. Therefore, make sure that your forms load fast and are also easy to fill out and complete on smaller screens. Remember, poorly formatted forms can lead to frustrated users and missed opportunities. Facebook Lead Ads are responsive by default, but always ensure they work just as well on smaller devices. 

Including clear call-to-actions

A Call-to-Action (CTA) button is not just an instruction, it’s a persuasive tool designed to encourage users to take action. Ensure your CTA button is clear, concise, and tells users exactly what they’ll get after clicking.

Testing and optimising regularly

The key to any successful marketing strategy lies in continuous testing and optimisation. Without creating and testing different versions of your ad, you’ll never be able to make the most of your campaign. Experimenting with different visuals, ad copy, CTAs, and forms helps you determine what resonates best with your audience. Use Facebook’s built-in A/B testing tool to compare different ad versions, and make informed decisions based on their performance to improve your lead generation efforts. 

Send new Facebook Leads to your phone

No exporting needed

facebook case study questions

Successful Facebook Lead Ads: Case studies 

Let’s take a look at some successful Facebook Lead Ads examples and discuss the best practices that helped them achieve their desired results. 

1. Mira Clinic 

Mira Clinic, a Turkey-based cosmetic dentistry and plastic surgery clinic, ran a lead generation campaign featuring testimonial videos of clients and influencers. They A/B tested the ad, one with Leads Optimisation and the other with Conversion Leads Optimisation. As a result, conversion leads optimisation helped them generate 48% more quality leads.   

facebook case study questions

Elements of success

  • Targeting the right audience : Mira clinic knows who their audience is, and as a result, they were successful in targeting them with the right message 
  • Attention grabbing Ad Creative : The use of video with a compelling message worked perfectly to grab the attention of the target customers. 
  • A/B testing : Testing various versions helped them find the one that generates quality leads. As a result they ended up generating 48% more quality leads, with each lead costing 36% lower.   

2. OSK Property 

This Malaysian real estate developer ran a Facebook Lead Ad campaign and earned 3 times more leads with Facebook Lead Ads using the right communication channel. They ran a split test comparing two lead-generation campaigns using the same creative – one campaign showing a form pre-filled with information from their Facebook profile, while the other redirected customers to automated question-and-answer experience on messenger. 

With the split test, they identified that though the ad creative was successful in attracting target audience, lead generation on messenger generated more quality leads. 

facebook case study questions

  • Right targeting and messaging : With a message that resonates with their consumer base, OSK property successfully grabbed the attention of their audience 
  • A/B testing and finding the right lead generation channel : Testing two different versions offering two different user journeys, the company figured out which approach their customers preferred. As a result, they were able to generate 3 times more qualified leads through Facebook messenger. 

The European FinTech company, SumUp, managed to generate quality leads and reduce its cost per lead by using lead filtering with Instant Forms. 

The company had been generating a huge amount of leads through Facebook Lead Ads. But there was an issue: Of all the collected leads, very few were quality leads. As a result, cost per lead was high. As they were struggling to attract accurate leads, they decided to test Lead Ads with a new feature – lead filtering. 

Lead filtering allows businesses to include a customised qualifying question in the Lead Form before people can submit their information. Thus, SumUp added a question, “Are you a business owner?” to their form. The question helped them filter the audience and collect quality leads by discouraging non business owners from completing the form. 

facebook case study questions

  • Attention grabbing ad design : With an attention grabbing ad design, SumUp was able to attract a huge number of leads on Facebook.  
  • A/B testing : Although the ads were collecting a lot of leads, there were very few quality leads, causing higher cost per lead. To fix that, they A/B tested their Lead Form with a new feature called lead filtering. Lead filtering helped collect quality leads and decrease cost per lead. 

4. Additive

Additive is a hotel marketing and sales automation agency. Running Lead Ads on Facebook helped them double their conversion rate and increase qualified leads by 3.7 times.

Additive’s ads featured stunning images of the luxury resorts and people. It also highlighted a €30 voucher for anyone who signed up. Additionally, they made the lead form submission process easier by using pre-filled lead forms with the customer’s name and email addresses added in already. They then conducted a multi-cell A/B test on different ad creatives which helped them identify the most engaging one.

facebook case study questions

  • Stunning ad creative and enticing message : Additive used vibrant and high-quality graphics to grab the attention of people, and it proved to be a success. Plus, the enticing message in the form of a discount encouraged more people to click on the ad.  
  • Simple lead form : Effortless lead form helped users to easily submit the form (details already filled out for them), resulting in a good conversion rate. 
  • A/B testing : Testing different ad creatives helped Additive identify the best performing design. As a result, they were able to maximise lead generation. 

And now it’s your turn!

Now that you know how to create and run successful Lead Ad campaigns on Facebook, go for it! On that note, you probably also want your next steps to run just as smoothly. After generating your leads, your primary goal is to convert as many of them as you can into paying customers. And you might already know that running the sales process manually causes delays and human errors, leading to missed opportunities . 

Privyr is a mobile-first CRM that helps you run your sales process smoothly from your mobile phone. It seamlessly integrates with your Facebook Lead Ads and automatically imports new leads into your device, allowing you to contact them right away on popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. Not only that, the app also helps you set an effective follow up schedule based on your interactions with leads, personalise and streamline the messaging process, and easily distribute leads to your team members.

It’s super fast and easy to set up automated downloads and lead alerts for your Facebook Lead Ads, right from your phone. Watch our step-by-step guide above.

Sounds interesting? Try Privyr for free today .      

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A writer from the heart and marketer from the mind, Michael writes to help businesses implement effective sales and marketing strategies.

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99 million people included in largest global vaccine safety study

19 February 2024

Health and medicine , Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences

The Global Vaccine Data Network, hosted at the University of Auckland, utilises vast data sets to detect potential vaccine safety signals

Global Vaccine Data Network co-director Dr Helen Petousis-Harris: Latest study uses vast data sets to ensure vaccine safety.

The Global Vaccine Data Network (GVDN) assessed 13 neurological, blood, and heart related medical conditions to see if there was a greater risk of them occurring after receiving a Covid-19 vaccine in the latest of eight studies in the Global COVID Vaccine Safety (GCoVS) Project.

Recently published in the journal Vaccine , this observed versus expected rates study included 99 million people (over 23 million person-years of follow-up) from 10 collaborator sites across eight countries. The study identified the pre-established safety signals for myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) and pericarditis (inflammation of the thin sac covering the heart) after mRNA vaccines, and Guillain-Barré syndrome (muscle weakness and changed sensation (feeling)), and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (type of blood clot in the brain) after viral vector vaccines.

Possible safety signals for transverse myelitis (inflammation of part of the spinal cord) after viral vector vaccines and acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (inflammation and swelling in the brain and spinal cord) after viral vector and mRNA vaccines were identified.

So far, these findings were further investigated by the GVDN site in Victoria, Australia. Their study and results are described in the accompanying paper. Results are available for public review on GVDN’s interactive data dashboards.

Observed versus expected analyses are used to detect potential vaccine safety signals. These studies look at all people who received a vaccine and examine if there is a greater risk for developing a medical condition in various time periods after getting a vaccine compared with a period before the vaccine became available.

Lead author Kristýna Faksová of the Department of Epidemiology Research, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark, remarked that use of a common protocol and aggregation of the data through the GVDN makes studies like this possible. “The size of the population in this study increased the possibility of identifying rare potential vaccine safety signals,” she explains. “Single sites or regions are unlikely to have a large enough population to detect very rare signals.”

By making the data dashboards publicly available, we are able to support greater transparency, and stronger communications to the health sector and public.

Associate Professor Helen Petousis-Harris Co-Director, Global Vaccine Data Network hosted at University of Auckland

GVDN Co-Director Dr Steven Black said, “GVDN supports a coordinated global effort to assess vaccine safety and effectiveness so that vaccine questions can be addressed in a more rapid, efficient, and cost-effective manner. We have a number of studies underway to build upon our understanding of vaccines and how we understand vaccine safety using big data.”

GVDN Co-Director Dr. Helen Petousis-Harris said, “By making the data dashboards publicly available, we are able to support greater transparency, and stronger communications to the health sector and public.”

The GCoVS Project was made possible with support by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to allow the comparison of the safety of vaccines across diverse global populations.

About the Global Data Vaccine Network

Established in 2019 and with data sourced from millions of individuals across six continents, the GVDN collaborates with renowned research institutions, policy makers, and vaccine related organisations to establish a harmonised and evidence-based approach to vaccine safety and effectiveness.

The GVDN is supported by the Global Coordinating Centre based at Auckland UniServices Ltd, a not-for-profit, stand-alone company that provides support to researchers and is wholly owned by the University of Auckland. Aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of vaccine safety and effectiveness profiles, the GVDN strives to create a safer immunisation landscape that empowers decision making for the global community. For further information, visit globalvaccinedatanetwork.org.

Disclaimer: This news release summarises the key findings of the GVDN observed versus expected study. To view the full publication in Vaccine, visit doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2024.01.100.

This project is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totalling US$10,108,491 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government. For more information, please visit cdc.gov

Media enquiries: gvdn@auckland.ac.nz and communications@uniservices.co.nz

State Of The Union

Biden Admin Pours $1 Million Into Studies Aimed At Denying There Are Only Two Genders

T he National Science Foundation is allocating over $900,000 in taxpayer funds to three universities to conduct a study claiming biology courses inaccurately portray sex and gender as binary, in order to make them more inclusive for transgender and non-binary students.

The study aims to explore how sex and gender topics are taught, their impact on transgender student belonging and interest, and ways to create a more inclusive curriculum acknowledging diversity in sexes and the complex relationship between sex and gender.

While the NSF claims strong theoretical foundations and peer review support the research, critics argue it amounts to denying basic biological realities in order to push an ideological agenda.

“There is a strong theoretical foundation on which the research questions are based,” a National Science Foundation spokesperson said, noting that its “merit review process is recognized as the ‘gold standard’ of scientific review.”

Concerns have been raised over the politicization of federal agencies and wasting of public funds to embed extreme gender ideologies in institutions, as part of broader DEI initiatives, when evidence for related medical interventions remains limited.

Calls have been made to rein in bureaucratic overreach promoting left-wing social policies.

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Biden Admin Pours $1 Million Into Studies Aimed At Denying There Are Only Two Genders

Woman found dead on UGA campus identified as Augusta University nursing student, officials say

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Authorities are investigating a woman’s death on the University of Georgia’s campus after she didn’t return from a morning run, the school announced Thursday afternoon.

Augusta University confirmed the victim was a student at the College of Nursing campus in Athens.

UGA police said they received a call just after noon from a person who was concerned for their friend, who had not come back from a run at the intramural fields. About 20 minutes later, police found the person in a forested area behind Lake Herrick with “visible injuries.” Officers tried to give emergency aid, but the person was pronounced dead at the scene.

“Me and my roommate, like pretty much everyone I know, we park over there. Me and my boyfriend go on runs over there all the time,” said UGA student Izzy Whitesides.

“It’s really beautiful and peaceful and now I feel like it’s tainted. It’s like scary a little bit,” said UGA student Alena Wiggins.

The school said in a letter to students that “foul play is suspected,” adding that the “safety and welfare of our campus community is our top concern.”

“The fact that the person hasn’t been caught yet is really scary. like hence why I had somebody come walk me back to my car. Yeah, it’s just scary that it’s probably of malicious intent,” said Whitesides.

At a Thursday night press conference, UGA police did not release the woman’s identity.

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UGA Police Chief Jeffery Clark said the woman was not a UGA student. Clark said he is urging the public to avoid the general area where the body was found while police investigate.

Clark said there is not a suspect but police are “actively investigating the case.”

“There is no immediate danger at this time,” Clark said. “My investigators will be working this case day and night, and they will be looking at every camera that we have.”

“This is a tragic day,” Clark said.

All classes at UGA have been canceled until Monday. The Augusta University College of Nursing canceled classes on Friday.

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UGA is asking the community to stay away from the area while campus police, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Athens-Clarke County Police Department investigate.

The school also mentioned a second death on the campus just hours earlier. A student died Wednesday night in Brumby Hall, they said, calling this a “traumatic time for our University.”

“And as we continue to mourn that tragic loss of life, today’s devastating news will uniquely test the resolve of our campus community, particularly our students,” they wrote. The university did not say how the student died.

Clark said at the Thursday press conference that the two deaths are not connected.

Police ask anyone with information about the incident to call the UGA Police Department at (706) 542-2200.

The University of Georgia offers 24/7 mental health crisis support to all students. They should call 706-542-2273 to speak with someone.

This story is developing. Check back with Atlanta News First for updates and sign up for news alerts .

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5 Questions with Research and Development Engineer Katie Payne

Katie Payne poses at lab - 5 Questions with Research and Development Engineer Katie Payne - College of Natural Resources News NC State University

Katie Payne graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in paper science and engineering and chemical engineering. She now works as a staff scientist with Solenis ‘ R&D Process Technology & Engineering Group in Wilmington, Delaware.

While at NC State, Payne was a member of the student chapter of the Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry, the University Scholars Program and Delta Delta Delta. She participated in a one-year paper science study abroad program in Jyvaskyla, Finland and Munich, Germany.

We recently spoke with Payne to learn more about her passion for paper science and engineering and how the College of Natural Resources prepared her for her career. Check out the Q&A below.

What does a typical day in your job look like?

I am typically splitting my time each day between 1-2 different projects for Solenis, where I am either working on a new innovation, improving internal lab procedures or troubleshooting plant or customer questions. This work involves a mix of work in our pilot plant at our research center, in offsite trials at customer sites or other pilot plants, in the lab or through meetings and/or email communications. My level of involvement in these projects varies constantly based on company and customer needs and priorities.

I also spend additional time, outside of my official role with Solenis, participating in Solenis’ sustainability task force and leading our newly created local chapter of Solenis Emerging Leaders, a group that helps newer Solenis employees to network and gain leadership skills.

What inspired you to study paper science and engineering?

I was very fortunate to receive a scholarship from NC State to study paper science and engineering. I enjoyed math and sciences in grade school so I wanted to work toward a career where I used those disciplines and studying paper science allowed me to do that. My focus in studying paper science and engineering and joining the pulp and paper industry was, and still is, to make contributions toward making the industry more sustainable so that it can provide quality, affordable products to customers while minimizing its environmental footprint.

What impact are you making through your position?

Fortunately, in my role as a scientist at Solenis, I work on some very exciting and innovative projects. Some of these different projects have the potential to provide more environmentally-friendly alternatives to industry standards and/or create different capabilities within the industry – and that is the kind of work that I am proud of.

I also have focused on creating positive social impacts within Solenis by developing a local group that allows new or younger Solenis employees to meet face-to-face and learn about each other’s roles and responsibilities plus get leadership advice. My intention for this group is to help people feel connected to each other and to better understand how they fit into the broader organization. It also allows them to learn about different career paths within Solenis and how others have navigated their careers.

How did the college prepare you for your current position?

The College of Natural Resources provided challenges – a new environment, new people, new concepts, tough coursework – and I was able to successfully overcome them. This gave me confidence that I could be adaptable and learn what I needed to solve problems and meet goals. This is crucial for the role that I am in. I need to be able to solve some tough problems, and I need the confidence to know that I can do it if I work hard and focus on achieving my goal.

What advice do you have for current College of Natural Resources students?

Vary your exposure to different subjects, people and opportunities while you are at NC State. There are so many opportunities there that you can take advantage of that will be harder to come by in the future. I was able to enjoy multiple international trips and study abroad opportunities, attend programs offered by the Honors Program, make friends and so much more. I am very grateful that I took advantage of all those opportunities when I did. 

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Reproductive rights in America

Research at the heart of a federal case against the abortion pill has been retracted.

Selena Simmons-Duffin

Selena Simmons-Duffin

facebook case study questions

The Supreme Court will hear the case against the abortion pill mifepristone on March 26. It's part of a two-drug regimen with misoprostol for abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images hide caption

The Supreme Court will hear the case against the abortion pill mifepristone on March 26. It's part of a two-drug regimen with misoprostol for abortions in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy.

A scientific paper that raised concerns about the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone was retracted by its publisher this week. The study was cited three times by a federal judge who ruled against mifepristone last spring. That case, which could limit access to mifepristone throughout the country, will soon be heard in the Supreme Court.

The now retracted study used Medicaid claims data to track E.R. visits by patients in the month after having an abortion. The study found a much higher rate of complications than similar studies that have examined abortion safety.

Sage, the publisher of the journal, retracted the study on Monday along with two other papers, explaining in a statement that "expert reviewers found that the studies demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor that invalidates or renders unreliable the authors' conclusions."

It also noted that most of the authors on the paper worked for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of anti-abortion lobbying group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and that one of the original peer reviewers had also worked for the Lozier Institute.

The Sage journal, Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology , published all three research articles, which are still available online along with the retraction notice. In an email to NPR, a spokesperson for Sage wrote that the process leading to the retractions "was thorough, fair, and careful."

The lead author on the paper, James Studnicki, fiercely defends his work. "Sage is targeting us because we have been successful for a long period of time," he says on a video posted online this week . He asserts that the retraction has "nothing to do with real science and has everything to do with a political assassination of science."

He says that because the study's findings have been cited in legal cases like the one challenging the abortion pill, "we have become visible – people are quoting us. And for that reason, we are dangerous, and for that reason, they want to cancel our work," Studnicki says in the video.

In an email to NPR, a spokesperson for the Charlotte Lozier Institute said that they "will be taking appropriate legal action."

Role in abortion pill legal case

Anti-abortion rights groups, including a group of doctors, sued the federal Food and Drug Administration in 2022 over the approval of mifepristone, which is part of a two-drug regimen used in most medication abortions. The pill has been on the market for over 20 years, and is used in more than half abortions nationally. The FDA stands by its research that finds adverse events from mifepristone are extremely rare.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, the district court judge who initially ruled on the case, pointed to the now-retracted study to support the idea that the anti-abortion rights physicians suing the FDA had the right to do so. "The associations' members have standing because they allege adverse events from chemical abortion drugs can overwhelm the medical system and place 'enormous pressure and stress' on doctors during emergencies and complications," he wrote in his decision, citing Studnicki. He ruled that mifepristone should be pulled from the market nationwide, although his decision never took effect.

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Matthew Kacsmaryk at his confirmation hearing for the federal bench in 2017. AP hide caption

Matthew Kacsmaryk at his confirmation hearing for the federal bench in 2017.

Kacsmaryk is a Trump appointee who was a vocal abortion opponent before becoming a federal judge.

"I don't think he would view the retraction as delegitimizing the research," says Mary Ziegler , a law professor and expert on the legal history of abortion at U.C. Davis. "There's been so much polarization about what the reality of abortion is on the right that I'm not sure how much a retraction would affect his reasoning."

Ziegler also doubts the retractions will alter much in the Supreme Court case, given its conservative majority. "We've already seen, when it comes to abortion, that the court has a propensity to look at the views of experts that support the results it wants," she says. The decision that overturned Roe v. Wade is an example, she says. "The majority [opinion] relied pretty much exclusively on scholars with some ties to pro-life activism and didn't really cite anybody else even or really even acknowledge that there was a majority scholarly position or even that there was meaningful disagreement on the subject."

In the mifepristone case, "there's a lot of supposition and speculation" in the argument about who has standing to sue, she explains. "There's a probability that people will take mifepristone and then there's a probability that they'll get complications and then there's a probability that they'll get treatment in the E.R. and then there's a probability that they'll encounter physicians with certain objections to mifepristone. So the question is, if this [retraction] knocks out one leg of the stool, does that somehow affect how the court is going to view standing? I imagine not."

It's impossible to know who will win the Supreme Court case, but Ziegler thinks that this retraction probably won't sway the outcome either way. "If the court is skeptical of standing because of all these aforementioned weaknesses, this is just more fuel to that fire," she says. "It's not as if this were an airtight case for standing and this was a potentially game-changing development."

Oral arguments for the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA , are scheduled for March 26 at the Supreme Court. A decision is expected by summer. Mifepristone remains available while the legal process continues.

  • Abortion policy
  • abortion pill
  • judge matthew kacsmaryk
  • mifepristone
  • retractions
  • Abortion rights
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