Steroids are banned in sport for many reasons. But they're not exactly banned in social media. They're widely used to drive up Likes, engagement and artificially inflate results.
Today I received an email from a social media agency ('ranked #1 social media agency', apparently). It was like reading a letter from a Nigerian lawyer, who just needed my account details for a large deposit of funds.
For a brief moment I really wanted to engage them for deep cover research on this blog post. But a far better use of my money would be to write about it and warn my clients and colleagues about the mischief instead.
Geoff (let's call him Geoff) promised to take my Instagram page from obscurity to stratospheric success. Included in his email was a graph showing my projected growth in page followers (36,360+) over 12 months using his 'accelerator' package.
I like to think people can see a snake oil salesman coming. But I'm so often surprised. Social media and tech in general is the wild west of snake oil salesmen.
In this case I can predict that Geoff would fill my Instagram account with a lot of fake followers. There are software bots to generate these. There are even vending machines on the streets of Moscow where you can insert your credit card to buy them. These automated bots would then whip along and Like my posts and leave odd generic comments to make me feel good.
The problem with this sort of accelerated growth is that an artificial audience will do next to nothing to serve your business in the long run. You may impress a few people with your high number of followers, but I guarantee these followers won't be in to buy your goods or services any time soon.
Steroids do harm to the health of the athlete in the long run. There's no easy way to win. Cutting corners won't help. You'll have to be patient and do the hard work to succeed. Your business is better off with an engaged group of 200 real and potential clients, than 200,000 fake ones.
Furthermore, if you do engage a professional agency to help you with social media, a largely fake audience causes huge headaches and can limit you in your future online marketing endeavours.
If Geoff get's in touch about your social media, pop him in the trash can where he belongs.