Social media is failing to provide trust and brand awareness
After 9 years of twitter usage the illusionary world twitter hides behind those viral tweets is no secret.
I’m an advocate of brand awareness and value and i’m starting to lose faith into twitter’s ability to cope with misinformation or providing a trusty environment for brand awareness viability without incurring into platform manipulation.
I started researching social media (specifically twitter) due being an adult online context, at first ,i didn’t understand why everyone had so many followers.
The targeted audience i focused on used twitter as Instagram (1-3 daily posts)
The first thing to noticed is that’s the standard number of tweets that get engaged by paid(fake engagement)
So let’s describe the different fake engagements
There are several levels of fake engagement that’s easily identified on twitter.
The most obvious one is a disproportionate number of followers that don’t match the feed activity.
Those fake followers can be:
- Follower Bots(plants)
- Fake engagement (real people replying)
- Retweet/like bots
- Catfishing
Bots
Usually just follow the account (in private mode or public) and stay there, normally their following number is higher than their followers.
Their feeds are devoid of any activity or maybe just spamming links in their feeds.
You got proxies too, the real owner of the bot follows the bot in case it gets suspended.
Some even have a link to their profiles so they can funnel traffic if someone scrols a follower
list.
Fake engagement(hired ghostwritters)
They are paid to like and engage with comments over their customer feeds.
From time to time, they sprinkle some tweets into their feeds to fake they are real users.
Maybe even post some photos of them being disabled, old lonely guys and so on.
It’s all about the fake so they don’t get suspended.
Basic, repetitive comments. If you check their feed tab and their like/reply tab you will notice it’s an engager with a pretty high accuracy 90% of times.
They do delete their replies after a time so twitter may not ban them.
Retweet/like bots
As it’s a no brainer, they just retweet and like.
Although some real people may act that way(no one using properly the platform retweets day and night)
Catfishing
Catfishing profiles come with a single visible pic(usually a female/male) and they engage with people just to provide a link to get the phishing scam going.
Common platform manipulation signs twitter ignores
Stickied tweet
The stickied tweet with a large number of retweets/likes means that account is platform manipulating most of the times.
There may be exceptions, like a viral tweet someone scored or a celebrity…but those are exceptions.
Unusually high Retweets per tweet(20+)/likes
I just said it right yes, +20.
There are no miracles, if a tweet gets 3k retweets in less than a day it’s suspicious.
If you check their retweeters 🔄 feeds and see all they do is to retweet then you got your answer.
Some interesting bot chains going on too.
An account follows several others and retweets them at the same time each one gets fake engagement and retweet (OnlyFans accounts from marketing agencies do this).
They usually include a mention in those retweet chains so they can push the verification status due a high number of mentions. Like “hey @guystwitter do you like this….”
There are several VERIFIED twitter accounts boosted in mentions by platform manipulation+fake followers.
Let aside being managed by ghostwritters engaging and deceiving fans.
The ammount of followers don’t match the account age or the feed content.
As always, when an account is just 1 month old and have 200k followers with only 12 tweets, that’s a clear sign of platform manipulation.
And twitter does NOTHING about it.
Those accounts are managed by marketing agencies too, so they can mix pretty pics with their other clients content.
So they fake all twitter iteraction among their own ecosystem.
Why platform manipulation is so toxic?
🟢A brand can’t compete in visibility vs platform manipulation if they base their value on customer trust.
🟢Minorities or innovative ideas can’t be heard
🟢Misinformation.
🟢Social platforms spend resources in symptoms instead the cause.
Twitter may act and ban 3k fake followers /retweeters but 2 weeks later they are back and keep doing whatever they did before.
Twitter is dousing fires but not taking long term measures so that fire is properly extinguished.
Closing comments
Always check the feeds of who retweet/like and you will notice they are empty or fake 80% of times.
Check the followers and you will discover the same.
Check the feeds of who reply.
Using common sense I can say at least 80% of engagement/followers are platform manipulation.
Even those stars with 1k replies if you check their accounts you will see they don’t have a natural feed ,just post the short reply and proceed to retweet all day.
Why twitter is unable to end fake followers/ engagement? I think they just don’t want to.
because they want those numbers in the platform faking metrics.
But then who is going to pay for a marketing campaign or social study if everything is rotten?
Is your client going to believe your ROI estimations?
No, I don’t think so.
So it’s for everyone best interest twitter fights platform manipulation seriously.
Why not to reward users/brands that make content for the platform?
In the end platforms like twitter benefit from ads in the feeds.
Why there are so many fake followers and there is no serious attempt to link a real person with an account?
1M followers and everything is fake, is this a secret anymore?