Bot Happy

With the rise of fake news and election interference on social media, fake accounts and bots have definitely come to the limelight. The connotation is that all bots are bad, however this isn’t the case, chatbots are used by many marketers to save money and support their customers. In this blog I’m going to be focusing on the bots that are negatively affecting marketers and skew stats and cause harm with their fake reviews.

Marketer’s focus a lot of their work on social media and social media is filled with lots of bots that can skew their data and potentially damage them. The question that marketers try to tackle is do they have to take bots in to account when reviewing data and how much do they actually harm them?I guess this question has many variables that we would have to take into account before we could give a definite answer.

A bot is always created by a human to do a function and this can be any automated action, such as posting on social media to gaining more hits on a website. Marketers can use bots to do different testing and they can gain lots of insights and knowledge from this. Bots can also be used to hijack social media accounts and create fake and spam posts for a variety of reasons, for instance political sabotage, bullying and impersonation accounts. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the other leading social media giants have all set out to control and stop the creation of these harmful accounts, however they clearly haven’t fully succeeded.

I think it’s impossible for marketers to ignore bots, however when collecting data and analyzing it they should definitely take in to account bots and should adjust their results to include bots, this can be done by using averages of industry standards for their specific data collection market or by using technology that is developed to specifically combat bots in data collection. Many companies offer these technologies, such as; Oracle, Zvelo, Adjust and many others.

I hope this gave you some insights into bots and their potential harm to marketers. As always if you have any feedback or suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Be in touch,

Zak