FAKE and its effect on Marketing
I think the use of bots in social media has really made effective marketing a lot more challenging. Malicious bots can affect engagement, steal your traffic and throw your SEO off, and can downright damage your brand. All this translates to possible loss of revenue and increased costs.
As marketers we should be concerned with fake social media accounts. These fake accounts won’t interact with our social media posts, but even worse, there mere presence causes our engagement numbers to appear lower than what they really. This doesn’t necessarily invalidate our data, but it does affect the veracity of it.
As concerning as all this fake accounts are, there are changes happening in an effort to make social media more transparent. In the UK for example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is tightening regulations on how personal digital data is used and acquired in marketing. At first thought it may seem regulation will make it harder to market, but in fact, it should be looked at something positively. Regulation directly tackles the use of bots and fake profiles and ultimately will result in more reliable data. Additionally, social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have all changed their models to be less dependent on Likes that are generated by a huge number of these bots and profiles. The landscape is changing, and it will ultimately make our data more reliable and thus, our jobs as marketers easier.
There are many things we can do on our own to minimize and control the integrity of our data. Most of it has to do with monitoring our social media and online presence and stopping bots and fake profiles. Here’s a great article that focuses on just how to do that:
While it seems like bots are a step ahead, there is change happening that can ultimately level the playing field. Let’s hope this change happens sooner rather than later. After all, we need that data!
