Evil Bots and Marketing

Many marketers can base their decisions off of data: especially big data.

However, one instance where that becomes an issue is in influencer marketing which is used in social media. In influencer marketing, marketers pay influencer with large online followings to promote events, services or products. The value to the marketer is that the influencer can reach a large audience. BUT, when people can also use bots to boost their numbers and make it seem as if they have a larger following than they do.

The question becomes: What do we do as marketers when we look at this data? Does this invalidate our data or just add to the veracity?

Well, before you even consider that, you can also audit the influencers or people you are marketing through. You can check to see if their followers are legitimate by analyzing comments to see if they are generic comments. You can use verification tools to help you decide if their audience is real.

At the end of the day, I don’t think that bots will invalidate data that you will get as a marketer. I don’t necessarily think that there are an overwhelming percentage of bots that would warrant that response nor that it would add to its veracity. I do think that bots need to be accounted for by marketers when making decisions and are part of the reason why a marketer’s decisions need to be data-informed rather than data-driven.