A rant on cheap social media growth

Need to vent.

So, while aimlessly browsing Facebook earlier, I came across one of the those ‘I bet you can’t…’ posts. I think this one went something like:

I bet you can’t name a city with the letter ‘A’ in it! Go!

This is so ridiculous it’s not even funny. Notwithstanding the simple nature of the question, (London. Moscow. New York City. Sydney. Tokyo. Boston. Edinburgh. Beijing.) it’s utterly mind-boggling how many people actually interact with this kind of content. I think this particular one had something like 260k comments or likes or something.

At first, I thought “Do the people who create this content actually realise how easy this is?”. Then I thought, “Yes! They must do.” What they’re doing is employing a well-known tactic that makes people engage in something: challenging them.

Challenging someone to something is a sure-fire way of getting what you want. A good example is two people (usually males but may be two females or a male and a female) getting into a bar brawl in a bar (or a pub, since I’m British). “You startin’ on me?!” is such a common phrase that it’s almost cliché, but it’s true: that phrase, or something like it, will almost certainly make someone go “yes!” subconsciously, without even thinking about it.

I think it’s the same in this instance. If a social media account posts something on Facebook saying, for example,“I bet you can’t think of a female name starting with C!”, people will respond. It’s guaranteed. Soon, it will rack up quite a few comments, likes and shares, and because of Facebook’s algorithm showing you things others have commented on or liked, others will see this too, creating a snowball effect of comments.

It’s the same with the equation pictures that do the rounds every so often. You know the ones: x + y + n = k etc etc etc. I saw one recently that had fruit as the elements in the equation, which was novel but it’s the same formula. People want to work it out to prove to themselves they can do it. Plus it’s procrastinating from whatever we’re supposed to be doing.

The point of this rant: it’s cheap. ‘Social media challenges’ is the equivalent to clickbait on Buzzfeed (“24 Ways You Know You Live In a Student House” etc) and it’s just a cheap, easy way of quickly accumulating followers or likes. It’s not clever, it’s not smart. It’s just employing an uninventive, uninspiring hack in order to make money somewhere down the line. The people you gather from this aren’t loyal to your brand…they’re just sheep who’ve liked your page because it has a cool name, or because they liked what they saw. They’re essentially cheap, nasty followers who have no care or loyalty towards your page. But then all the people who run the account are going to do is spam them with content in an attempt to make money. So I guess it’s fair game.

Just had to get that out. Back to work.