Bot Battles: How Fake Followers Affect Marketers
Phonies are all over the Internet — and I’m not talking about Snapchat filters.
I’m talking about bots.
We’ve all encountered obviously automatically generated social media accounts, comments, and DMs. Perhaps we’ve even been tempted as social media managers to boost our own organization’s perceived popularity by buying likes and follows.
But aside from the obvious inauthenticity, spamminess, and questionable ethics, the overabundance of fake content produced by bots — often at the hands of marketers themselves — makes our job of interpreting the data we collect all the more difficult. Bots skew our metrics on everything from our content engagement to consumer demographics, degrading the veracity of the otherwise-neatly-delivered charts and numbers we receive from Facebook or Google.
Social media bots have even been blamed for damaging democracy and spreading COVID-19 anxiety.
So what’s a marketer to do to prevent misinterpreting data when using it to guide marketing strategy?
While it may be easy — even satisfying — to pull up neat charts and figures and use them to make marketing decisions, we need to start better examining our data before qualifying it.
As tech ethnographer Tricia Wang states in her Ted Talk, human beings are greatly influenced by the quantification bias, causing us to become fixated and unable to see past the numbers.
As such, it’s important to keep an eye out for anything which seems a bit off. For example, if your product or service is designed to primarily target an American market, but you notice a huge spike in website traffic from India, it’s probably caused by automated activity unless, of course, there is a practical reason to explain otherwise.
And the easiest way to be part of the solution? Stop using bots to artificially inflate your social media presence — it’s tacky and unsustainable in the longterm.
