It’s not unusual to hear complaints of companies engineering their social media presence, and I’ve blogged about some of the offers I’ve received to bolster my twitter account with fake followers. And some analysts are trying to quantify the trend: Gartner has suggested that 10 to 15 percent of social media reviews will be faked in the next couple of years.
But there is some good news: this social spam might start to disappear because it simply doesn’t work. The LA Times has an interesting article that claims film studios are losing interest in Facebook campaigns that ask people to “like” a film, because the approach simply doesn’t show a good return on the cost of the campaign. Perhaps everyone is wising-up to what is actually going on, and won’t be fooled by likes that are obtained with bribery. Whilst we’re a long way from all marketers dropping the shadier side of social media, hopefully we’ll see more and more people focusing on genuine social recommendations rather than using fakes to make the numbers in their marketing reports look good.