SocialBakers | LGK Marketing Matters Blog

Photo Credit: Rennett Stowe/Flickr under Creative Commons license

If you are a small to medium-sized business that has embraced the new normal of social and content marketing, you have to be scratching your head right about now. You have taken the plunge, made a commitment to a marketing strategy, plan and budget and now find yourself perplexed. How is it that some companies, including your competitors, can have high volumes of friends, followers, fans, views and likes with nary a post, interaction or conversation? How can it be when you have been all in for at least six months or more, others within a week of setting up shop have unbelievable social numbers? Truth is – for the naïve, earnest and honest – the business of social is not as organic as we would like to think. News flash – social clicks are a multimillion-dollar industry. The numbers you salivate over can be misleading as explained and exposed in an Associated Press investigation featured in the New York Post.

Celebrities, businesses and even the US State Department have bought bogus Facebook likes, Twitter followers or YouTube viewers from offshore “click farms,” where workers tap, tap, tap the thumbs up button, view videos or retweet comments to inflate social media numbers.

An Associated Press examination has found a growing global marketplace for fake clicks, which tech companies struggle to police. Online records, industry studies and interviews show companies are capitalizing on the opportunity to make millions of dollars by duping social media.

In 2013, the State Department, which has more than 400,000 likes and was recently most popular in Cairo, said it would stop buying Facebook fans after its inspector general criticized the agency for spending $630,000 to boost the numbers.

Tony Harris, who does social media marketing for major Hollywood movie firms, said he would love to be able to give his clients massive numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook fans, but buying them from random strangers is not very effective or ethical.

Here’s the takeaway. Numbers matter to the bottom line but when it comes to social, focus on quality, consistency and the process of engagement. Commit to a system for long-term results. What’s your take? Would you rather engage a broker for bogus clicks and no bottom line benefit or build an authentic audience of real people with real needs that you can educate, inform, convert and provide solutions to their problems? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section of this post.

Read the original article on the New York Post.

Postscript: SocialBakers offers a free tool to weed out fakes and frauds and the video below, courtesy of Veritasium, sheds more light on the social shenanigans currently operating on Facebook.

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Don’t be a day late, dollar short or full of fake friends. Check out the latest addition to the LGK Tuesday Toolbox:

The Fake Follower Check is a cool tool from SocialBakers that every company, brand and social user on Twitter should pull out of the box! Using an eight point scale of analysis, the tool identifies your followers as fake or empty (those with no followers), inactive or good. It also allows you to block fake followers and to view the most searched Twitter accounts, which provides an indication of accounts people think are suspicious. You can use the Fake Follower Check up to 10 times a day. Although the tool is still in development status (beta) and free (as of this writing), SocialBakers reports data accuracy with a small error margin of roughly 10-15%. Good ammunition to weed out spammers who load your feed with unwanted messaging and to concentrate efforts on community, connection, content and interaction with genuine followers.

SocialBakers is a social analytics firm which provides solutions that allow brands to measure, compare, and contrast the success of their social media campaigns with competitive intelligence.