In this world of social media, competitors are around every corner. This is valid for nearly every industry, business, and person looking to grow their profile and reach. With the all too well-known and morally white strategies, one can attempt to scale up but the majority run into walls. Performance marketers all over are in a job because of this difficulty - to reach targets with minimal or zero spending. What's to be done, then? Are we to give up on the potential to make a pretty penny and have our names on everyone's lips just because something slips onto a slightly unethical side? I wouldn't do so, but you've got a choice to make:
1. Interaction farming:
A classic old-as-the-hills strategy to grow your digital channel - Interaction farming. Let us take the example of follower farming performed on social media. All you need is a mention in your profile or top post that you reciprocate followers with a follow. This lets the other account owner's guard down and they would be open to following you.
- follow an account, they follow back, you unfollow, a good share won't realise this happened
- you sow a seed (follow), you nurture it (like posts, engage), you see it grow (get the follow back), you reap what you sowed (unfollow and repeat)
The old and gold formula of follows for follows goes way back to the beginning of online blog-based communities. It's quite obvious that one would receive more engagement if they were to have a bunch of people following them through the sheer number of eyes they get. This is easily reciprocated over all forms of interactions.
2. Giveaways:
Have you ever seen a "Free PS5 Giveaway" on a YouTube video that possibly has an audience made of mainly young adults and old teens? The likelihood is fairly high. Fake giveaways also include much lower tier giveaways like $50 gift cards on Instagram for the cheap price of 1 follow, 1 like and 1 comment. To an individual this may feel like nothing but to a social media page, this is growth. Whether they actually give away the prize money to a random commenter is a whole different story. Some go one level beyond and ask people to tag people, and more comments will result in a higher chance to win. The resultant increase in engagement amounts reached and brand visibility can mean greater future monetizable leads. These types of giveaways are extremely popular on social media platforms and have been for years.
3. Open job applications:
You must be thinking I'm absolutely out of my mind, but hear me out. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram each have a feature where you cannot message someone unless you're connected with or following them. This can be used by companies and people to farm followers, especially since on LinkedIn if you want to communicate with someone it automatically makes you follow that account. Some HR sourcing companies prey on innocent beings looking for opportunities by putting out vague posts that do not actually end with jobs or even anyone being interviewed. To connect with these people, you end up boosting their follower count.
4. Three interlinked mini-tricks used by companies all over:
a. Trend-jacking:
To jump on a trend or viral bandwagon by inserting yourself into the narrative is trend-jacking. It's an easy way to farm interactions by talking about topics the world is or wants to talk about.
b. Virtue signalling:
Your aunt does it, your media giants do it, and your certainly non-virtuous corporations do it the most. The name of the new game is virtue-signalling. The idea is to create content that attempts to allow the brand's perceived image to resonate with a target audience they're looking at. This resonation plays on humans' instinct to get behind groups that show their interests being protected.
c. Vague measures of social proof:
I'd imagine the psyche behind cigarette ads in the era depicted in 'Mad Men' went something like - "4 out of 5 doctors claim that smelling a cat's ear once a week is more deadly than smoking cigarettes every day". When we hear that a doctor is involved in a decision, we do not usually check the credibility of who the doctors are but what the outfit of the representation is and think "yes they must be right". In the modern day, the same can be done by channels who wish to have their brands validated by vague statements like "economists say XYZ stock broker is the best in the market" and keep nothing to back that up other than some blogs that backlink onto their own platforms.
With this year coming to a close and young companies looking to get new followers and gain a presence and potential leads, these popular techniques might be useful to them. They're ethically grey in my personal opinion and rather valid tricks to acquire new leads. I feel that these methods are misleading to people who actually end up following and interacting with companies.
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