By OliL

When it comes to bringing in site traffic, paid social media is an easy choice. For increasing brand awareness, maximising your engagement with customers and promoting your business with sponsored posts or listings, it’s a no-brainer.

But the problem of bots on social media is well known, and when it comes to your social media strategy, these bots could be having a serious detrimental impact.

So how do bots affect your social media efforts? And does this mean that you need to cancel your social media strategy as soon as possible?

Before you panic and pull the plug on your paid social, let’s look at the bigger picture.

How do social media bots work?

There are many different types of bots that perform a wide variety of tasks on social media. One of the most common is performing automated likes, follows or comments on posts.

Once a bot is set up with a social media profile, it can then perform these clicking actions 24/7 as required.

This kind of bot can be easily created by anyone with a fairly basic level of programming knowledge. You can even hire a developer online to create a botnet, or better still you can also hire a ready to go botnet from around $100.

When it comes to social media bots, most developers will use a huge network of fake profile bots and hire them out online.

So, how do these social media bots impact your marketing strategy?

1. Traffic on your ads

Perhaps the most obvious impact on your paid social marketing strategy is the issue of fake clicks or impressions. When you’re paying per click, you’re obviously hoping that views and clicks are genuine humans.

So for a bot to click or view your ads is essentially wasted money as this engagement has zero chance of a conversion.

These fake views occur either on the main social media platforms, or on the ad network. These may for example allow ad placements on apps and partner sites.

When you factor in these fake impressions, it has been found that around half of all engagement on paid social posts comes from non-genuine sources.

2. Not-so influential influencers

Influencer marketing is hot, and is a trend that many businesses leverage to reach a young and savvy audience. However, as we’ve seen, it’s so easy to buy likes and followers that the very validity of many influencers has been called into question.

A study by CHEQ into the economics of fake influencers found that the loss to fraud per post ranges from 20 cents for a low level influencer, all the way to over $37,000 for one of the A-listers, based on the cost for sponsorship.

The exact amounts of bots on social media varies from platform to platform. Typically, among the wall gardens (highly-used digital advertising platforms which keeps their technology, information, and user data to itself) disclose that 5% of it’s accounts are fake profiles.

Other social media platforms are all also heavily populated with bots, …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron