Competitors can target ads at your Facebook fans

Ever thought all those Facebook fan page likes you've been gathering for your business page might actually give your competitors an advantage?

I finally managed to tweak Facebook ad targeting to break even on the ad spend. Until this point I've lost money on all types of ads I've ever tried (AdWords, StumbleUpon Ads, Reddit Ads, Project Wonderful). The key was to target very specific likes. Targeting people who like Japan wasn't specific enough, so I started trying to get more specific. How could I target the people who might not only be interested in Japanese candy, but also actually willing to open their wallets? 

What better proof of such intent than actually having already purchased something online. I made a list of all Japan-related e-commerce sites I could think of and started showing ads only to people who liked the fan pages of those sites. This finally resulted in some conversions. After a while I stopped running those ads though, as I believe over time they will start converting worse and worse as they are being shown repeatedly to the same people. While this didn't result in a sustainable new source of converting traffic, it still makes me happy to at least briefly get some results out of all the time I've spent tweaking ads.

So every Japan-related e-commerce site, please gather as many fans as you can so I'll have more people to show my Candy Japan ads to ;-)