Social Media in a fake world
Instagram used to be my favorite social network. That was up until the whole thing became so fake. Don’t get me wrong, I still love it, but certainly not as much as I used to. Instagram is not the only network that has this problem, they all do, but I feel that it certainly has it the most. I probably unfollowed at least 300 people in the last few months because I was losing interest.
The first aspect of being fake on social media is the filtering of content. In the article below it discusses the idea that people often feel the need to portray perfect lives. For example: going on dream vacations often, eating out every night, and of course being in the perfect relationship. It is literally the same posts on everyones feed. The perfect pictures.
Than it gets even better, the filtering. What goes on on all social media platforms is ridiculous. The amount of filtering on pictures I dont even know what is real anymore.
This picture to the left accurately describes what is going on. People legitimately filter their entire lives. They filter how their face looks, how their bodies look, how their house looks, how their dog looks, the background of their pictures and so on. Basically nothing is not filtered.
There was a time when I was looking to find a makeup artist for an event. I went on Instagram to start scrolling and it was so hard for me to see whose work was actually good because of all the filtering. Literally every single person on every makeup artists page looked so flawless. It just made me wonder if these people were actually good at applying makeup on people since they needed to filter their posts so much.
This article above describes perfectly the reasons why every individual feels the need to act a certain way on social media. It than discusses, perhaps the biggest issue with social media nowadays, bots.
The article says: From cries of “fake news” to the rise of bots, bogus followers and other trolls, it’s hard to know whom, what or where to trust.
Possibly one of the main sources of engagement on many social media networks, is the likes and comments feature. There is nothing people enjoy more than satisfaction and attention for their posts and tweets. But how are people supposed to keep people engaged in their page when their are so many people to follow? What would make people enjoy following them more than someone else?
This is where bots, bogus followers and trolls come into play.
Everyone on instagram, twitter, linkedin, facebook etc. wants to have lots of followers and likes and comments on their posts in order that they look popular, and fun to follow. But obviously it is extremely hard to build up a following considering so many people are all blogging, posting, tweeting etc. about the same things. So what do people do? BOTS.
People look at bots as if its a solution, but in reality bots shouldn’t even be an option.
This blog posts explains clearly what a bot is, and how to spot them.
Bots are going to be the reason that people get fed up with social media. People dont want fake, they want REAL.
Bots, bogus followers and trolls play a huge part in the marketing world. Our jobs as marketers is to effectively validate our data and get it out efficiently for the world to see. The usage of bots and all these things can make it extremely difficult to do this. People will no longer know the difference between what is real and what is fake.
No different for certain companies. I go onto websites and see thousands of reviews with 5 stars, but one word comments. Like HELLO this is quite funny. Do they really expect people to think that this is real reviews?
Bots can help marketers in one sense, but also be very unhelpful as well. With the usage of bots marketers can carry out so much. Its basically an automated system of what to say and when which can be great. So imagine having automated systems carrying out positive messages all day!! Additionally it helps with website content which can be amazing for business. This can be great:) The downside of this for marketers though is that it can bring fake traffic into a company and people will realize this.
The clear downside of this for marketers though is that it can bring fake traffic into a company or to peoples social media accounts and people will realize this. The fake likes and comments that are going on so that peoples pages look grand is out of control. This is a disaster and it really must stop if people want others to continue engaging in their posts. I dont know about you, but I hate looking at people who have 1.1M followers, but than only 1,000 likes. Makes me wonder are those followers real??
