Black hat social media isn't complicated. It's buying likes, followers, and developing a fake audience for a fake community to generate fake business. The thing about fake business is that its fake and you're just wasting time.
My patience is wearing thin with black hat social media enthusiasts. With Facebook likes becoming more and more diluted and a recent uncovering of over 80 million Facebook fans being bots we're creating a layer of garbage within social media. Taking a social media routine and turning it into trash takes this technology and turns it into a gimmick.
Well I've had enough so now I'm going to call all of you black hat social media managers out. Your business secrets are crap. Your techniques aren't wanted. You're wasting all of our time.
Buying Facebook Likes
Buying Facebook likes is usually the first thing people search for when a social media campaign starts to struggle. Instead of developing an engaging content plan or incorporating social SEO or learning something new its much easier to cheat. Black hat social media managers will pay anywhere from $100 - $1000 for Facebook bots to aggressively like a page. They'll charge a premium and you'll get your fans, but you won't see any engagement. If you're wondering why - it's because the people aren't real. You just spent cash on fake people. Congratulations.
Automated Community Management
There are scripts and plugins that allow automated messages to appear within your Facebook and Twitter feed. This can also be automated fairly easily with Tumblr and Blogger using an article spinner. What this does is it takes two or three pieces of original content and spins it to create the illusion of new articles. It's actually the same damn one just reworded.
There's no skill here. Boring clients have boring content at first so instead of talking it out and finding a strategy - they do this. STOP DOING THIS.
ALL THE COMMENTS!!!
When you write a blog entry or share content on social media your goal is to engage people. What better way than a black hat social media manager to show user engagement than to populate 1,000 fake comments on a piece of content related to your brand! What fun! Now you're popular!
And you look like an idiot! All the comments are going to be backlinked to terrible quality websites. They'll have no relevancy to the content and they'll obviously be deduced as fake. Why people do this is clear, but silly. They want the illusion of popularity. They don't want to achieve it.
So if you see a page pop up with 2,000 likes in a day or two or a website with 5 articles skyrocket to 50 you'll know why. If you see a Twitter account with 5 or 6 followers everyday FOR TWO YEARS you'll understand. These are just snake oil salesmen used tricks by black hat social media managers.
There are more black hat social media methods and some are arguably not terrible. They can give a campaign a jolt or visibility boost needed in order to compliment ACTUAL WORK, but alone they are a recipe for disaster.
An experienced social media manager will know whether or not to implement any of these tactics, but I wanted the inexperienced to realize we all know this stuff exists. If you didn't now you do.
Give it a rest.