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Posted in Social Media Marketing
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04/20 2010

Social Media Numbers – Ain’t got it? Then fake it!

In recent times I was amazed at the kind of fake numbers game that many agencies resort to, to justify the money they charge for social media marketing. All SMM professionals would know the cheap tricks that an agency can employ to make the client feel “happy”, however most self respecting social media agencies would rather be sacked than resort to such tactics.

I am of course assuming that this post is being read by an unsuspecting client who was thrilled with the few hundred followers on twitter overnight with the “twitter default profile image” – so here’s your reality check. If you are social media professional I hope you will not resort to any of the below tactics. After all cheating cant get you long term clients, so better not try. In this part I shall delve on Twitter (hope to cover Facebook in a following post)

To illustrate this let me take the real world case study of Uninor (mobile services) on Twitter

Twitter Alert 1 – Followers with no profile image

If you are seriously on Twitter, and I mean seriously you will have spent enough time selecting your profile image. Now imagine if your brand page has a lot of followers who would rather be birds in different colours what would it say about them? If you did count 89 of 358 followers did not have a profile picture.

uninor social media fake profiles

Twitter Alert 2 – Followers with no activity

Ok so lets take the above example screengrab furtherand look at the profiles of AMALKALRA and raviteja032. AMALKALRA has no tweets follows only Uninor! raviteja032 is even better with no tweets and only following Uninor! Now ask yourself what your brand needs to do to get such die hard followers who are not interested in anything else in the world.

uninor fake social media profiles

Uninor fake social media

Twitter Alert 3 – Followers who create accounts very close to each other

Taking the same example above it transpires that AMALKALRA and raviteja032 created Twitter accounts within a day of each other (we are not saying they can’t be genuine Uninor fanatics but… )

Uninor and social media

That’s it for this part, we will carry on the series of what to watch out for when the report card comes in each month.

  • Tarun

    it’s very true what the author has to say about SMM taking the clients for a ride. Marketing itself is a function of the business with no measurability however, social media provides the accountability since it is to do with real people and social networks but how easily these can be manipulated is deftly explained by the author.

    It makes you wonder then whether the PR that stated that Salman Khan more people following him in a day then SRK did is part of a bigger scheme

  • AB

    Guys, Amazing post…almost all big agency do like this….no even for twitter , for campaign hits, form submissions, viral hits, facebook community……………………. But still corporates giving the project to big companies who just talk good..have same VC hands….