Real or Fake? Followers of that influencer you follow on IG or Twitter are mostly bots.

Yes!

The 2k likes on an Instagram post, 1000 retweets, 5 million followers of an account on Instagram or Twitter, you were drooling on the other day, they are mostly bots. In the ever-growing world of Influencer marketing, the dynamics have changed. According to a report in New York Times, titled “The Follower Factory”, many entertainers, celebrities, influencers, and even corporate top executives have as much as 80% fake followers.

When you see an account with a high number of followers, a tweet with many retweets or a post with high no. of likes, you assume that person is famous or well known. You are more likely to follow that person. This amplifies if your ‘friend’ has already fallen for the gimmick and you see him/her as a follower on that account.

This virtual status has real-world incentives as well. These so-called influencers charge as much as $20k for a single post or tweet with a million or more followers. Not just that, influencer marketing has been on a boom in the past few years, and CMOs of top companies as well as startups are betting huge on it to sell their products and services.

There are Companies selling Bots.

In short, bots are the fake accounts created with software. And they act as programmed. Simply put, if you buy likes or followers or retweets, there is software which has a list of fake accounts/bots to perform desired actions. And Software companies selling these services take a nominal fee for it, as low as 50 paise per follower or 10 paise for a like.

The New York Times article particularly pinpointed Devumi, a company offering social media growth, which as per the news report, is mostly used by top celebrities, speakers, influencers and even politicians. But there has been a tremendous rise in the number of companies selling various services to increase your virtual status in last two years. Devumi and some other companies are out in the open, but many of such companies, have a team of tele-callers or sales agents to sell their services, instead of advertising online.(They understand the effectiveness of social media advertisements better, more on this in another blog).

Recently, an old colleague who now runs a digital marketing agency, contacted me offering a bouquet of such services. He especially highlighted the downloads on app stores. He was selling one download for 10 cents, and you can get as many downloads for your app as you want. And what struck me was the app reviews on app stores were also on SALE.

The services rendered by these companies are drastically different from advertising. With advertising, the likes and followers you get are by real people.

Everything is on SALE -

Facebook page likes, views on youtube Videos, subscribers on Youtube channels, downloads on App stores, everything is on sale now. There are some unique services for select customers as well — LinkedIn endorsements, reviews for places on Google, Amazon product reviews, etc. And software companies selling these services take a nominal fee for it, as low as 50 paise per follower or 10 paise for a like.

Not that the online platforms are not aware of the bots, but they are unable to fight (Or If I can guess in this matter, they might be more happy to have them for showing high user counts on their platforms). These bots are mostly duplicates of existing accounts, especially those which are inactive or less active. And thus they easily avoid detection.

And as a marketer, it does not make sense to me to spend my ad budget on fake interactions. Apart from bots, there are other fake accounts as well, created by many users on various social media platforms. This makes me question the effectiveness all my social media and influencer marketing campaigns. What are your views on it? Let me know in the comments.

Foot note — Here is the link of the article — https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html