How to spot fake friends
Facebook friends that is. And Instagram followers. And Twitter. And everywhere else. I was recently finishing off the last couple of seasons on Homeland, and a big part of the story line was tackling a radio host who ran an underground company whose main task was to incite anger online through fake profiles. Turns out, this stuff actually happens in real life. Although Carrie and Saul had to deal with these accounts as a matter of national security, us marketers have to worry that these fake accounts will make our efforts obsolete.
One way that this manifests is by having a disproportionate engagement rate. In a way, this is like having fake friends. It’s like looking at a contact list of hundreds of names, but none of those names sends you a text on your birthday. Kind of the same thing. You may be looking at a post that was part of a larger campaign for your company, and seeing hundreds of likes, but none of them translated into webpage views or to sales. This phenomenon messes with one of the most important tools marketers have to make sure that our creative pursuits have a business benefit as well — our numbers.
This also makes it harder to reach our real friends. For example, in my marketing internship now, I have been posting on social media to promote the company’s online gala coming up. We have been posting on particular days and times to coordinate with when our followers are most active, so they will be more likely to see our post. If our accounts are clogged up with bots, the posting schedule would be totally out of wack, and our real followers will be ignored.
Lastly, these fake bots lack what we as marketers want to find out about our customers including their income, age, location, values, desires, tastes, etc. Today’s marketers can glean this information from data. The problem that arises is that bots are not reliable sources of this information. Therefore, looking at data from fake accounts will prevent us from taking this information and turning it into revenue for our companies.
