The Bots are Taking Over

The news has been going around this week that millions of Donald Trump's Twitter followers are fake -- automated "bot" accounts that are not real people.

Not all bots are bad, but they can easily be used to falsify interactivity in social media.  How do bots work?
The Newsweek article cited above says that close to 50% of the president's Twitter followers are not real people (15 million accounts on the day that Newsweek checked). Barack Obama had about 21% fake accounts following him.

Snopes confirms that many celebrities with large Twitter followings, have lots of what appear to be inauthentic, automated profiles.

Heck, I even have at least one bot following me -- one Facebook friend from another country was liking literally everything I posted. So I asked, and indeed this friend is using one of several browser extensions to automatically like everything I post, as a sign of respect (no commercial interest).

Here's another example of another legitimate use of a bot:  Many student radio stations have a special Twitter account to automatically tweet every song the station plays.  Their motivation is to have the music companies notice and send them more free music.  It works, and there is no deception involved.

This site notes that a bot is just a computer program that can do things automatically, like liking, favoriting, or retweeting, based on criteria you set. It can actually follow Twitter user who has tweeted a particular phrase.

It's used all the time to build a feeling or relationship in social media, and of course, the only way to determines a given account IS a bot is to go inspect it for posts and other personal content.  If there is none, it is likely a bot.

This site tells you how to create your own Twitter bot in a way that is fairly non-technical. Have at it.

So what is the take-away here?

Bots are part of marketing communications today.  People may create bots because they like you, or you may create your own bots (by the hundreds, thousands, or millions) to make yourself look more impressive.

For people who DO social media marketing, simply counting likes and shares is not a good indicator of success anymore.  In my Social Media Marketing class, I teach that we need multiple independent ways of evaluating success.

Particularly today, don't be deceived by big numbers of likes and shares.