Instagram. YouTube. Twitter. You name it; all these platforms have some level of bots to allow influencers and celebrities to have a higher number of followers and likes. What’s the point of buying bots and getting high following? Simple. High following means high influential power, which translates to these influencers being approached for sponsorship deals from brands and scoring mega bucks.
Take for instance, this research study conducted by Mediakix, an influencer marketing agency. The agency created two accounts, both faking to be Instagram influencers, and had great success in securing four endorsement deals. Yes four, two from each account.
All they had to do was hire a local model, take some free stock photos, purchased some fake followers and engagement and boom! Four endorsement deals from real-life brands.
According to Captiv8, a company that centres around connecting influencers to brands, an influencer that posts a promotional tweet and has 100,000 followers earns an average of $2,000. An influencer with a million followers earn an average of $20,000. Not only are buying fake accounts and bots is quite embarrassing to the influencer themselves, they are also deceiving and scoring sponsorship deals with brands.
Online users are very well affected as businesses like Devumi sells bots and stolen identities of them. It was said that at least 55,000 of these bots are copying the photos and names of actual users. These stolen identities are then sold to influencers to gain followings.
This is the sad reality and the dark side of social media. Some of these influencers are taking advantage of the rise of Influencer marketing as they buy fake followers and engagement to attract more brands to work with them.
On that note, what are your thoughts on this issue and can major social media platforms stop this?
The 101 Guide to Digital Marketing 
An unfortunate world we live in currently where numbers talk more than genuine engagement!
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Indeed. Not only is it humiliating for the influencer but it is also a fraudulent and deceptive conduct.
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Hi Carmen!
Great Blog 🙂 I think buying fake followers is deceptive and not fair for consumers trusting brands and also for brands who are making deals with influencers who are doing so.
Also major social media platforms such as Facebook are working to fix this as they have started to invest in tools to detect fake accounts and delete them which is what they use for the fake followers. Although Facebook may not be directly working to fix this, by deleting fake accounts they are indirectly helping the situation.
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Thanks for the comment, Fidela!
I agree with what you said. Buying fake followers may be tempting to influencers or brands but in the end, if found out (which no doubt it will if the activities are suspicious), will result in broken relationships and trust. If for whatever reasons the bots are not detected, brands would nonetheless not be generating sales with fake engagement and promotion to bots. It’s nice to know that social media platforms are getting in and holding accountability in tracking down these fake followers. Though I’m not sure how effective the tools are in detecting and deleting these bots; at least they are helping to reduce it and hopefully make the lives of consumers and brands better.
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Hey Carmen, interesting post!
I’ve already seen my fair share of ‘fake follower’ related videos and posts but wow, I’ve never seen something like what MediaKix did! Truly scary stuff. It’s really frustrating to me that you can buy so many followers for so cheap too – you can buy a few hundred for just a few dollars!
It’s really deceiving to the companies who are looking to spend their valuable marketing dollars on influencers with a large portion of fake followers, they may think that their product will be seen by something like 50,000 people but really it could be only half of that.
I think it’s also damaging for the whole community because it somewhat becomes just a game of numbers and there could be less and less incentive for users to gain followers by actually creating engaging and valuable content!
If you have time please check out my blog post and let me know what you think! Thanks 🙂
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Thanks for your insight, Victoria 🙂
It’s surprising how one can easily get loads of followers overnight for just a simply small price. A small price for them is a huge financial lost for businesses. This is also very discouraging for users who genuinely creates content for their followers, but are not able to see end results. Seeing fellow peer users using such strategies to gain followers and get sponsorship deals will no doubt be tempting to genuine users and may sway them into considering the approach and further spread this conduct. Tools and algorithms can only do so much in detecting these fake followers and bots, so it’s better if businesses take caution and heavily research on influencers they want to approach.
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Hi Carmen,
Some interesting points you’ve brought up! Especially the case study about Mediakix.
I believe that purchasing followers and engagement is very deceptive and adds to the inauthenticity of social media. There is already a lot of misleading content on Instagram/Facebook – influencers selling products they do not use for a large price, filters, photo editing.
I did some research on what social media companies are doing to fix this and it was reassuring to discover that they seem to be taking action and deleting millions of fake accounts. However, this will be an ongoing issue. There will always be ways to get around spam, privacy and fraud policies and with so many fake accounts, it takes a lot of time and effort to identify these fake accounts.
Take a read of my blog and let me know what you think 🙂
Cheers,
Madison
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Thanks for your feedback, Madison!
I agree, it will take some time and effort to detect and delete these fake accounts. With many of these accounts made daily and technologies advancing day by day, these bots are bound to find some way around it. But at least social media companies are known to the issue and are doing their best to stop it 🙂
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