I'm convinced that 99% of all "these" are just fake.

[contract]

"These" being followers/likes on pages for Instagram and Facebook.

You can just pay X per month and it's ALL 100% automated these days. Yeah, it looks real but when you get down to it, it isn't.

I know there are a handful of legit viral pages, established brands, the few really hustling on social, etc. They are the 1%. They exist.

But the other 99%... I'm just not seeing how someone with no website, no brand, or a few hundred images they didn't take, etc. Can get over 150,000 followers within a few months? Then you go check their own personal page and you find out they own a "media company" which has 15 terrible photos on IG and 5,000 followers? But no website, no brand, no mentions anywhere on G.... ? Then you realize they are using fake services for all their accounts.

I keep seeing the same patterns over and over and over. The more you dig into this shit, you realize how much of social is just all propped by up pretenders. People trying to be influences, secretly screaming look at me!

I'm not hating but it doesn't look great when you've got an endless number of people pretending out there with 100K+ likes/followers and you're going the authentic route and are in the thousands. You almost have to inflate those numbers if you want to be taken seriously.

Fake it till you make it, but then keep faking it because those faking it don't know when to stop?

 

[Samwise89]

Everything I've seen makes me agree.

The few legit Facebook pages are getting swallowed up by other pages. People try to launch new pages off the backs of old ones by promoting on them, but the reach is so bad now, like 2-3%. You can pay to boost.

Instagram is botted to death. That's not even a question at this point.

It goes a lot deeper too. A lot of the top 1000 Alexa is buying bot traffic to stay there and commit display ad fraud. It's all about appearances, but if a little money can be skimmed off the top too, then why not.

Fake followers though, nothing takes the cake like Twitter. I'd guess that over half of Twitter is bot profiles and traffic and comments.

Reddit too. Depending on the sub, some of it is at least 75% bot comments and votes. Overall I'd bet the entire site is around 25% bot everything.

Really though, it doesn't hurt. I don't care if a competitor has 100,000 followers and I have 1000, if his page gets no engagement and mine gets a ton. That's already becoming the difference. Nearly everyone is aware of social media being botted and everyone faking their profiles. People will start being skeptical about it more and more.

 

[Mahjong]

Instagram is botted to death. That's not even a question at this point.

But I still make like 2% conversion rate, on IG? Why do you think it is full of bots?

 

[Potatoe]

Even if 50% of it is bots, or 75%, or even 90% ... that still leaves boatloads of attention (traffic) that you can purchase for incredibly cheap. I just want to add that into the conversation cos it's important.

When you have a few big accounts, it becomes much easier to seed new ones, so when you see brand new accounts popping up with a lot of followers quickly, a lot of that is just cross-promo too, not necessarily fake. Get in touch with those media companies and influencers, a lot of them still don't realize how valuable their assets are.

 

[ryandiscord]

I wonder if some of these accounts are using tools like followliker to follow and like posts then unfollow them until they grow their account to gigantic numbers. I've seen it used in moderation and it does work. Haven't seen in at scale but, I don't see why not.

 

[miketpowell]

IMHO it's not nearly as many bots as people think. It's just a bunch of people that use the internet in a way that they basically seem like bots. They surf the web all day long, click all sorts of shit but never actually get out a CC or buy anything.

I've got a bunch of pages with 100k+ followers and a handful 1mm+ and have avoided "bots" in that as much as we possibly can. However, they all have bad engagement at this point.

My hypothesis on it is there is just a good % of the internet that is pretty worthless as traffic. They surf all day but never buy. If you want to buy clicks, impressions or advertise your page - this is the traffic you get at the low bid levels. Facebook, Google & others know who these users are and are happy to give you them as traffic unless you block it.

You also get rock bottom eCPMs on your own ads if this is the kind of traffic you get.

Now maybe it is bot traffic. In many ways it doesn't really matter, it's traffic that doesn't make us money and that's all that matters.

My point though is it's much less intentional then you believe I think. I never wanted to get worthless followers on my pages and avoided any methods that would drive bots. But I still ended up with a bunch of worthless/bot followers. If your goal is to raise the follow count that is what ends up happening.

But to the point, that the number of followers doesn't mean much. That has been true for quite some time. Just like raw traffic numbers don't matter either.

It's just like list building. It doesn't really matter how big your list is - that's a newbie mistake to make. A list of 1,000 buyers/past customers can make 10x a list of 1,000,000 prospects potentially and costs less to mail/contact.

 

[secretagentdad]

I think there might be a pretty simple way to see through the noise.

Just do the good bad neighborhood mapping but with influencer intermentions like you would for seo neighborhood nodes.

All the good influencers circle jerk like crazy. Thats how they keep the engine going.

 

[Tavin]

My hypothesis on it is there is just a good % of the internet that is pretty worthless as traffic. They surf all day but never buy.

Why do they need to buy something? Why would you try to covert traffic that comes from a source like organic social, when there's no purchase intent? People use social media primarily for entertainment.

If the traffic is real, remove the bottleneck, monetize what makes sense, which is their eyeballs. Impressions based advertising, including preroll, etc. They don't even have to leave the platform.

Because of this knowledge gap, there lies a large opportunity. Like James said above, the vast majority of people managing these pages have no idea the value they have, and will sell them cheap.