Real People Are Turning Their Social Media Accounts
Into Bots - And Cashing In
Social Media bots create fake engagement. And they're quite effective.
They make posts appear more popular than they are, tricking algorithms into spreading them further.
And there's a good chance there's one in your feed right now.
Bots are amazing tools for bloggers. Amazing indeed.
Viral Hippo, the BuzzFeed News–created Instagram account
that used a bot
to rack up more than 1,500 likes on a photo of a
black square, netted almost double that on a photo of a yellow square. It
pulled in 1,400 likes on a diagram of the human sinus, and more than 1,200 on
an accidentally shot photo of a hubcap. The likes were from real accounts.
"It’s not just Russian bots and hackers, it’s 22-year-old kids in their dorm rooms and influencers and brands of all sizes."
And the additional exposure bots provide can be quite valuable.
And as LinkedIn and other Social Media platforms have increased in popularity, Zopto and other similar services — including automated engagement trading groups on apps like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram itself — have become must-haves for many looking to build a business or gain exposure on the internet.
Brands like Walmart, Kroger, and the skin treatment product Aquaphor showed up in sponsored, engagement-juiced posts BuzzFeed News uncovered. Multiple bot users who liked Viral Hippo’s intentionally terrible posts liked these posts as well. The sponsored posts on Instagram can fetch anywhere from $500 to $3,000 a pop. Walmart did not respond to requests for comment. Kroger did not comment. Aquaphor spokesperson Leslie Kickham told BuzzFeed News the company has severed its relationship with the Instagram influencer that was promoting its products.
“Fraudulent activity is bad for everyone. We have a strong incentive to prevent this kind of behavior on Instagram and staff a number of teams to detect fraudulent activity and shut it down,” Instagram spokesperson Gabe Madway told BuzzFeed News.
Kent Heckel's bot farm.
Sitting in his small, lofted bedroom in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, Kent Heckel picked up a palm-sized computer off a ledge next to his bed and explained how it’s home to more than 2,900 Instagram bots. The computer, called a Raspberry Pi, is a $35 hobby machine designed for students, teachers, and tinkerers. For Heckel, it’s been something else: a bot farm, delivering a stream of US-based likes to his Instagram account and the accounts of five paying clients.
Heckel’s bot farm is not a complex operation. He uses the Raspberry Pi to run a script that checks his and his clients’ accounts every few seconds. When the script sees a new post, it logs into each of the 2,900 accounts it controls and uses them to like it. The script can automate up to three likes per second. It pulls the bots’ usernames and passwords from a spreadsheet Heckel bought access to on Telegram’s Black Market group for approximately $1,600 last year. For Heckel, the bots come together masterfully. In April alone, he’s used them to make $12,000.
Heckel has no reservations about gaming Instagram — and no regrets, either. For him, the platform's failure to protect itself from manipulation has established an uneven playing field just asking to be exploited. “It’s not just Russian bots and hackers, it’s 22-year-old kids in their dorm rooms and influencers and brands of all sizes,” he said. “The damage is done on a very large level because nothing is genuine.”
"The products people are pushing to you are inauthentic and most of the comments under them are fake. That’s not the system that we want to live in."
Renee DiResta, policy lead at Data for Democracy, believes this level of manipulation is deeply corrosive. “The risk of realizing that the internet is massively manipulated is that the cognitive overhead to process even the most basic interactions increases, suspicion increases, polarization potentially increases,” she told BuzzFeed News. “The engagement is fundamentally manipulated; the content you’re seeing, you’re seeing because someone gamed an algorithm; the products people are pushing to you are inauthentic and most of the comments under them are fake. That’s not the system that we want to live in.”
Bot's proprietors often insist their service was legitimate and not a violation of platform policies. They claim that the engagement they deliver is not entirely automated, and their algorithms push the posts to a sea of thousands of human likers across the world.
Heckel said he's dubious of such claims. “If they are actually doing it by hand my mind will be blown,” he said. “They send 10,000s of likes a second.”
The bots really do work. Instagram’s algorithms use comments and likes as key signals when deciding which posts to place at the top of your feed — and bot's likes and comments helped Viral Hippo reach a broad audience beyond those who followed the account. Two screenshots of viral tweets were liked by more than 4,000 people, compared to the baseline of 1,500 likes for the all-black square.
Boost Power Bot drove hundreds of likes to a stock image of a steaming manure pile.
Via bots like Zopto, you can also like and comment on an endless stream of posts — posts from doctors, lawyers, professional influencers, self-proclaimed venture capitalists, models, fitness gurus, marketing agencies, and even a few baby accounts. It likes hundreds of posts per day.
Cade Ellis, an 18-year-old rapper, told BuzzFeed News he was using a bot on Instagram to expand his reach and break out of geographic isolation in North Florida. “Social media is very important to get out there; I have to use it,” he said. “It helps you look good and establish yourself.”
Photographer Reilly Small echoed that sentiment, noting that Instagram’s algorithm had negatively impacted his reach in a way that forced him to get creative. Software like bots are necessary. “I love Instagram, but because they meddled in this kind of way, I think that it is pushing a lot of influencers and businesses to look for other ways to grow.”
On Telegram, engagement trading occurs in the open. The messaging app — currently battling Russian government attempts to shut it down over its unwillingness to hand over its encryption keys — is home to groups, whose entire purpose is to game Instagram. Share your account credentials with a chatbot called Boost Power Bot, found via the BoostGram group, and your posts will get engagement “within minutes,” the service’s promotional video promises. “It’s that simple!” two women declare at the end of the video. The two women in the video weren’t lying. Boost Power Bot drove hundreds of likes to a stock image of a steaming manure pile posted to Viral Hippo.
There are similar engagement gaming communities on Facebook Groups. The 17,000-member “Instagram Engagement Group” posts “daily like threads,” where members comment with their username and link to a post they want members of the group to like. Then, using a browser plug-in called “LikeItAll,” group members like every post in the thread automatically. LikeItAll’s web page boasts of more than 127 million posts “autoliked.” Facebook shut down the Instagram Engagement Group on Thursday after being contacted by BuzzFeed News.
The reciprocal nature of these services makes it easy to determine who’s using them. “How did you find out that I'm using a bot?” Armand asked. Answer: Her popular account had liked a completely gray square posted by Viral Hippo. She wasn’t particularly concerned though; to Armand, gaming Instagram is so commonplace, it’s unremarkable.
Given the incentives created by Instagram, Heckel and his fellow Fuelgram users feel like they have a simple choice: post to Instagram, pray for engagement and risk not getting any; or do whatever you can to amass likes and comments to get your profile, business, or political view in front of the platform’s 800 million users. Heckel has made his decision. If Instagram can’t stop people from gaming its algorithm, he’s going to game it. And should Instagram shut down bot services, he anticipates more will rise in their place. “There will always be a next thing, a next bot … something in the pipeline in the Telegram groups,” Heckel said. “Just so you know — and you can quote me on this — I don't plan on stopping.”
1. Built-in
Relevant Audience:
How?
The
Influencer tag will upgrade your value and expand your reach without any
hassle.
There's
more:
Dharmesh
Shah in his post, The Surprising Brilliance Of The LinkedIn Influencers
Program, wrote that when he shared his content on other social media platforms…
The
maximum number that he got was 50,000+ views.
But
when he shared articles on LinkedIn after becoming an Influencer.
The
average number of views raised to 123,000 views!!
In fact
his most popular article has received 1.2 million views and 4,200 comments!
Your
reach increases after becoming a LinkedIn Influencer.
2.
Dramatic Increase in Followers:
Here's the kicker:
With an
Influencer Tag, people see you as a much more reliable and trusted source of
information.
3. Growth in Networking:
Networking is everything, literally everything nowadays.
Because
LinkedIn Influencer gives you a Perfect Staging for Networking.
See
what Dharmesh Shah is mentioning about the number of Likes and Shares he got at
two different mediums, namely Twitter and LinkedIn.
He has
told us some amazing facts, such as this one:
For one
of his posts, he got 485 likes on LinkedIn as compared to 155 tweets on
Twitter.
And
this was solely because of him being a LinkedIn Influencer.
4. Expanded Branding & Promotion:
LinkedIn
Influencers:
LinkedIn loves more content which generates more traffic and revenue.
And the
amazing part?
You really can become one!
Cold emails aren’t a numbers game.
You don’t have to send 1000s of emails just to score a disheartening open rate of 2%.
(That’s the often-touted open rate for cold emails, BTW.)
That’s all just a lie perpetuated by marketers who suck at cold emailing… and who want to make you feel like you’re as horrible at this delicate skill as they are.
Truth be told:
Cold emails can – and do – work.
But
Your cold emails don’t start working until you get THIS right
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Yes, this type of product appeals to a select crowd, but have to know where to look.
Here Are 5 Ways To Get Annuity Leads Online:
1. Annuity Lead Companies
One way you could get annuity leads is by paying someone else to find them for you.
A multitude of annuity lead-generating companies exist; however, they aren’t all safe or worth buying from. It’s this catch that makes purchasing annuity leads one of the riskiest ways to grow your annuity business.
While YouTube is a fun way to scour for the internet’s most viral videos, it’s also a powerful way to disseminate your brand’s message. With over 1.5 billion monthly active users, the platform’s reach is second only to Facebook. In regards to video, however, YouTube is still the reigning king of content.
While its business-oriented functions are less clear-cut than say, LinkedIn, YouTube has a variety of features that cater to your business needs beyond the simple tutorial or webinar. With over 30 million daily active YouTube users worldwide, now is the time to take advantage of a platform that has yet to realize its full sales potential.
1. Optimize your content
The first (and arguably most vital) step of the YouTube lead generation process is to make your content shine. If you’re not sure where to begin, here are three rules of thumb in mind: educate viewers, answer questions, and provide calls to action (CTA).
Focus on the keywords that are most popular in your industry and find ways to incorporate them into the titles of your videos, on in their descriptions. While YouTube is its own veritable search engine, others like Google and Bing will index your videos; so when you include the proper keywords, you have the potential to show up multiple times in a given search. Since YouTube videos will play in succession (a.k.a. “related” videos), optimizing your content is crucial to its overall performance.
Here’s an example of a beautifully detailed description from the channel ASAPScience:
It’s safe to say that the New York-based media company BuzzFeed is a cultural phenomenon. Each month, the “social news and entertainment company” garners over 5 billion video viewsacross its various social channels, and the digital content producer's flagship channel, BuzzFeed Video, now has over 9 million subscribers. As BuzzFeed continues to set the benchmark for creating socially shareable content, independent video producers (like YouTubers), multi-channel networks (MCNs), and brands seeking influencer partnership opportunities can all learn valuable lessons from BuzzFeed’s viral video growth strategy.
Why Do BuzzFeed Videos Go Viral?
It’s no mistake that BuzzFeed’s content is everywhere. The media company has spent countless hours developing a formula specifically designed to make videos go viral, and both video producers, marketers, social media influencers, and brands can replicate the media company’s success by emulating the following elements of BuzzFeed’s content creation and distribution strategy:
Here are the strategies
that you’re going to learn about:
đź‘‘ Good landing page design is absolutely essential to lead generation. What's the point of buying traffic to your site if you don't put in the effort to understand how to convert it? [READ] Lead Generation Training - A Beginner's Guide
Learn step-by-step how to do local SEO for your target market in this quick video below:
It’s no secret that lead generation is important.
In fact, it’s a culmination of several different skills: you need to master content, sales, psychology, and good old-fashioned marketing if you want other people to become clients.
Bottom line? If you want more shmoney, lead-gen is a must.
And in this guide I’m going to show you everything you need to generate quality leads.
Cold emails aren’t a numbers game.
You don’t have to send 1000s of emails just to score a disheartening open rate of 2%.
(That’s the often-touted open rate for cold emails, BTW.)
That’s all just a lie perpetuated by marketers who suck at cold emailing… and who want to make you feel like you’re as horrible at this delicate skill as they are.
Truth be told:
Cold emails can – and do – work.
But
Your cold emails don’t start working until you get THIS right
WANT more leads?
Selling one annuity could net you thousands of dollars in commission.
Yes, this type of product appeals to a select crowd, but have to know where to look.
Here Are 5 Ways To Get Annuity Leads Online:
1. Annuity Lead Companies
One way you could get annuity leads is by paying someone else to find them for you.
A multitude of annuity lead-generating companies exist; however, they aren’t all safe or worth buying from. It’s this catch that makes purchasing annuity leads one of the riskiest ways to grow your annuity business.
While YouTube is a fun way to scour for the internet’s most viral videos, it’s also a powerful way to disseminate your brand’s message. With over 1.5 billion monthly active users, the platform’s reach is second only to Facebook. In regards to video, however, YouTube is still the reigning king of content.
While its business-oriented functions are less clear-cut than say, LinkedIn, YouTube has a variety of features that cater to your business needs beyond the simple tutorial or webinar. With over 30 million daily active YouTube users worldwide, now is the time to take advantage of a platform that has yet to realize its full sales potential.
1. Optimize your content
The first (and arguably most vital) step of the YouTube lead generation process is to make your content shine. If you’re not sure where to begin, here are three rules of thumb in mind: educate viewers, answer questions, and provide calls to action (CTA).
Focus on the keywords that are most popular in your industry and find ways to incorporate them into the titles of your videos, on in their descriptions. While YouTube is its own veritable search engine, others like Google and Bing will index your videos; so when you include the proper keywords, you have the potential to show up multiple times in a given search. Since YouTube videos will play in succession (a.k.a. “related” videos), optimizing your content is crucial to its overall performance.
Here’s an example of a beautifully detailed description from the channel ASAPScience:
It’s safe to say that the New York-based media company BuzzFeed is a cultural phenomenon. Each month, the “social news and entertainment company” garners over 5 billion video viewsacross its various social channels, and the digital content producer's flagship channel, BuzzFeed Video, now has over 9 million subscribers. As BuzzFeed continues to set the benchmark for creating socially shareable content, independent video producers (like YouTubers), multi-channel networks (MCNs), and brands seeking influencer partnership opportunities can all learn valuable lessons from BuzzFeed’s viral video growth strategy.
Why Do BuzzFeed Videos Go Viral?
It’s no mistake that BuzzFeed’s content is everywhere. The media company has spent countless hours developing a formula specifically designed to make videos go viral, and both video producers, marketers, social media influencers, and brands can replicate the media company’s success by emulating the following elements of BuzzFeed’s content creation and distribution strategy:
Here are the strategies
that you’re going to learn about:
đź‘‘ Good landing page design is absolutely essential to lead generation. What's the point of buying traffic to your site if you don't put in the effort to understand how to convert it? [READ] Lead Generation Training - A Beginner's Guide
But before we get started...
Take notes:
Learn step-by-step how to do local SEO for your target market in this quick video below:
It’s no secret that lead generation is important.
In fact, it’s a culmination of several different skills: you need to master content, sales, psychology, and good old-fashioned marketing if you want other people to become clients.
Bottom line? If you want more shmoney, lead-gen is a must.
And in this guide I’m going to show you everything you need to generate quality leads.