WARNING
Before you read this post, it is VERY black hat… Not illegal, but completely immoral and I don’t suggest you carry out this technique. Note that at the end of the post I’ll show you how to negate this if it ever happens to you.
The Algo
The Facebook algo, aka EdgeRank displays the posts from your pages likes in segmented portions, for example: If you have 1,000 likes it it will show 100 people who like your page your post, if a number of them engage with the post then Facebook will show it to more people, as well as show it to people’s friends who have liked and commented on the post.
Because of the way the algo works, it’s left perfectly open to people wanting to exploit it for negative attacks on competitors.
The Back Story
I run a pretty big niche site and I buffer out content to it several times a week, one of my main (and only) competitors in the market started re-posting the content I was sharing, making fake accounts to report my page, and so on… It was starting to become a real pain in the ass, and like all pains, they should be removed.
So, I was contemplating the algo whilst going on a social media content binge and I came up with a scenario.
I launched my social media VA who runs all my social bots (working on an Instagram botting post soon, signup to my newsletter for updates) and bought a couple hundred Facebook accounts to stick into my Facebook bot – The seller also sold proxy access for each account as well, which works great with a FBook bot.
My enemy competitor had around 1,300 likes compared to my pages over 6,000 but I’d also noticed he’d started running ads to likes from my page and his own with the content I’d already shared… So I Skype’d my VA who set to work drip feeding my fake bots to his Facebook pages. A few days later and he’d hit nearly 2,000 likes.. I got my VA to then have my accounts periodically login for 30 mins – 2 hours and go through the newsfeed, and engage with posts – Purposefully excluding engaging with any posts from my competitor.
Essentially this stops your competitor from ever gaining traction with Facebook, because when it shows that initial 10%, you know a good portion of those are going to be your likes, which never engage with the post.
The Results?
From a FanPage Karma Score of 22% –
To a FanPage Karma Score of 3% –
His engagement rate also went from around 0.7% to under 0.2%.
Marketing is Warfare and you better be prepared for those that are willing to go all out.
This won’t work with most Fiverr gigs, as they don’t login their accounts periodically, which means the fake audience is never shown the posts.
Negating This Kind of Attack
It is rather difficult to stop this, but Social Media Examiner have a guest post on how to. You can easily hire a VA to do what this post recommends for you.
You diluted their reach with fake accounts. I’m surprised that Facebook’s algo is so unsophisitcated as to fall for this. I suppose they’re too busy limiting your organic reach, so you buy paid ads, to improve it.
Indeed, it works very well though.. Kinda scary.
Great Article.
Thanks Jae 🙂
Thanks for sharing as usual, Charles! Sure, maybe this tactic is immoral, but it looks like he was really asking for it! =D
If someone wants to throw the first punch in marketing, then I’m down for war. ^.^
What FB Bot do you use?
I had my developer edit FaceDominator 🙂
What software do you use for instagram automation?
Instagress 🙂
Awesome thanks for sharing! !
Really awesome article, thanks Charles……
Organic reach is down so much that I don’t even bother posting unless I’m going to boost it.
My reach is performing pretty well organically, I have 4.2k+ fans and average 50 – 200 clicks per share 🙂
Charles, just downloaded your ebook on MARKETING Warfare. Props man despite doing Online marketing for 13+ years my mind was Blown !! Like you I was hunted down by the Google spam team in both penguin and panda updates…..the Google f#cking Zoo ate my rankings, closed my adsense account and two google ad word accounts, The cute Google animals ate my empire for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And there I stood living it up in Miami. .With my income chopped by 80% in the matter of a few months. #hardtimes
None the less I’ll be reaching out for some consulting and training soon.
Thanks for the comment man, glad you enjoyed it so much! ^.^
Have a merry Xmas 🙂
Hey Charles, have you ever tried reversing this?
So, whenever your page makes a post, you use the bots to ensure that the post always gets likes/shares as soon as it is shown to your audience…. then I would think this gives a new increased momentum to the rest of your potential audience?
I have not, good idea why not try it out! ^^
It’s on 🙂
Can I shoot you a pm regarding something else? Whats the best email to use?
Sure 🙂 me@ this site!