Facebook to polling firm Gallup: No matter what consumers say, our ad business works

If Gallup’s latest poll taught Facebook anything, it’s not to trust consumers.

In a report released Monday entitled “The Myth of Social Media,” polling firm Gallup questions the effectiveness of advertising via social media. Its killer metric: 62% of American adults say social media advertising has no influence at all on their purchasing decisions.

Facebook, with its billion-dollar advertising business, feels differently.

“The only thing this poll shows is that self-reported behavioral data is unreliable,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement yesterday evening.

Facebook’s internal studies, which examine changes in attitudes and behavior using experimental design, offer far more reliable metrics, the spokesperson said.

“For decades, studies that look at people’s actual, real-world behavior have shown that ads on all mediums, including social media, affect the things people buy. The most successful marketers in the world don’t just take our word for it when it comes to ad effectiveness, they’ve asked us to prove that our ads work. And we have.”

Facebook generated $7 billion in ad revenue last year globally, sucking up the vast majority of U.S. companies’ $5.1 billion social media ad spend.

To acquire its data, Gallup surveyed more than 18,000 U.S. adults in December 2012 and January 2013.