Today’s social media world thrives on the fuel of likes, comments, shares and reposts. The major chunk of digital marketing depends on how much engagement the website or brand is generating. Everything revolves around consumers, sometimes in an intrusive manner. All this is in order to stay relevant and alive in the market. Well, speaking of engaging with the customers, influencer marketing has created more spam than actual conversations and the general public wouldn’t agree more. This article talks about how far brands go to create engagement or at least show the world that they do it in an organic way or by paying for it.
Robots: At Your Service
How often when we face some issue with a product or a service and try to reach out to customer care, instead of being attended by an “Actual” person, a bot comes in to first play its pre-recorded stuff and we have to waste minutes or even hours, pressing the buttons the bot “commands” us to press. Like it or not, they have become an integral part of every company’s communication system. They stand first in the line of fire. When the furious customer takes them down, the actual people step in.
Many bots are just templated versions. Some do not even understand common alphanumeric strings like – I was supposed to get my order on 30th August, but I got a mail that I’ll get it on 12th September. Why this delay? The bot will freeze and reply no further. That’s the reason many local sellers choose to sell their products via Instagram instead of creating a website and delaying the entire process and profit.
Fun Fact: Meesho started their business using Instagram, Facebook & WhatsApp
Bots pose this basic problem of understanding, though there are AI-integrated bots, only the bigwigs get to enjoy its perks because of the cost involved in developing and integrating that into the system. Today, brands rely more on influencers for enhancing their brand value and sales. They have the potential and good fan following to take the engagement to the next level.
Engagement: Natural or Forced, does it matter?
If the objective of the brand revolves around achieving a particular number, it really doesn’t matter if the bot generates it or the influencers. Engagement can be bought. You can buy likes and views or make bots comment on your posts. The only way to identify a real person from ‘spam’ is if the replies seem standard, one-word replies or just emojis. The quality of leads generated purely depends on the engagement mode that the brands use.
Is Influencer Marketing Flawed?
If you take a dig at the corporate world, in general, everything is flawed. No system is perfect. There aren’t many apps to measure the authenticity of the bots or fake accounts. The problem lies with the brands placing undue importance on increasing the follower counts and engagement without putting much thought into the ‘how’.
If we could paraphrase R Madhavan’s dialogue from “Rang De Basanti”, “No system is perfect. We need to make it perfect.” How?
There are a couple of apps such as Upfluence, Neontools, Social Blade and Not Just Analytics that enable brands to understand the association between the influencers and their audience. If not the association, the brands would at least understand the data around it.
One way to separate fake accounts from authentic influencers is the “Blue Tick”. The Blue-Tick verification can help brands get rid of the fake accounts impersonating the expert influencers and ensure social media is free from the “Spam-Bots”, but not all bots are spam. Twitter has been cleaning up millions of spam bots each week but allowing some “good spam bots” that answer some stock-related or weather-related questions.
At 3 Bots, err… 3 Dots Design Pvt. Ltd., we believe that creating authentic engagement that strikes the right chord with the customers, is our forte. Being one of the best ad agencies in Pune, our work revolves around crafting continuous communication and we do it with the help of our team of experienced content writers, creative artists and designers, strategic and branding managers, and digital marketing experts. If you wish to know more about who we are and what we do, please visit www.3dotsdesign.in or get in touch with us at contact@3dotsdesign.in. We ensure that bots won’t be welcoming you, but we will, in person.