Dirty Social Marketing Practices

Users of social networks usually slowly gather friends to share links and interesting information found on the network with them. Such a system, based on loyalty and trust, allows marketers to encourage this feature of potential buyers of advertised products. People are more likely to trust other people and companies that have many friends on social networks or many views on YouTube. This stimulates artificially overestimating these indicators, naturally people appear ready to help with this. And since real friends trust each other, marketers are trying to get into these conversations by offering discounts on products or money so that people mention the right brands when communicating with their friends. And slowly, Twitter and Facebook are flooded with such "paid" messages.
Below you will learn about several ways that marketers are actively using.

Friends and followers for sale

Anyone who wants to become more popular can try to get followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook for thousands, and there are many opportunities for this. It is forbidden to sell followers on Twitter if the seller has not received special permission and has not signed an agreement with the company. They monitor users who have a lot of followers in a short time, because most often these accounts are not real people. And for marketing it is very important that there are as many real people as possible among the audience.
Friends selling services know this and add followers gradually, slowly enough so as not to attract attention. Owners of these services pay real people small amounts so that they become followers of an account.

Paid Messages and Status Updates

Some marketers have come to the conclusion that word of mouth cannot be bought. Nevertheless, in social networks you can buy the transmission of the necessary information “word of mouth”. Marketers pay popular users of social networks for mentioning products and companies in messages and status updates, attracting large advertisers to such campaigns that have a strong viral effect. This segment is currently considered one of the fastest growing.

Friendship as a financial pyramid

Schemes for the formation of financial pyramids made it possible to attract millions of people to dubious events. For the sake of obtaining greater benefits, a man urged his friends and acquaintances to "join the game." One of the marketing companies from San Francisco practices similar methods. To get a lot of unique links, they suggest people post them and convince friends to do the same. The person who attracted the most was declared the most influential on the Internet and received some kind of award. The Fast Company magazine in such a campaign promised the "most influential" to put his face on the cover. At the same time, truly influential people on the Internet are unlikely to waste their time participating in such events.

Guaranteed YouTube Views

Anyone who has ever uploaded their video to YouTube would like their video to be watched as often as possible. And if your company is not satisfied with the number of views of its "viral advertising", there is an opportunity to rectify the situation. Sharethrough does not pay users for views. Instead, the company is ready to pay a fee for posting video companies in places where users can stumble upon them without suspecting a trick, and ideally they will start discussing it with friends, distributing links to all their acquaintances. In this way, advertising has already been used by many large companies with world names and significantly increased the number of views of their videos.

Marketing has always been an important and necessary element of the information flow. On the one hand, why not become part of social media? On the other hand, the structure of trust-based social networks - the most valuable element for marketers - will deteriorate over time, because people's trust is not unlimited.

A source