How our fake business won a Customer Service award | Hacker News Reader

How our fake business won a Customer Service award

blog.recomazing.com

36 pointsmdev10 comments

It can be even simpler. I'm working in the enterprise software space and get multiple emails a week stating we have been selected as on of the 'Top X vendors in X' and won the award for Y by a certain magazine or by a local 'trade association', or can be part of a 'prestigieus' Top 100 list. The only thing we need to do to get the award is to buy some advertising space to cover costs. Normally this is between $3 and $5k.

The conversation pretty much stops after I indicate we are happy with the award and the nomination, but will not buy any advertising with them. Funny thing is: a few weeks later some of the vendors in the space will show of their new award of place on the Top X list on their LinkedIn pages :)

24,000 twitter followers for $30, one time payment? Makes me wonder what the ratio of live humans to automatically generated bot-accounts on twitter is. And the total number of registered twitter usernames in existence.

There are websites where you share your twitter or facebook page and users their will follow/like your page in exchange for you to do the same for their page...exchanging likes/follows. After few days these users will unlike or unfollow you to keep their follower/following ratio balanced.

This is why buying ads on Facebook or Twitter is a waste of time.

I've experimented with this actually. Loads of followers for $5 Loads of retweets for $5

All the followers followed me within 48 hours, within a week or two, all were banned.

All the retweets did nothing for my "organic" retweets, it provided no new coverage, since the account who retweeted it, only had fake followers, so nothing really happened.

I did use ads.twitter.com and that didn't really do much, but I'd say it did better for bang-for-buck.

I tested these kinds of pay for follower services a few years ago. I had 75k twitter followers in less than a week for under $100.

Within three months I had 13k

Within a year I had about 2k

It hovered around there.

On facebook I bought 3k likes for around $30

I still have 1k likes for that page.

Basically, the only reason I have read that you would want to buy followers is that it can help boost your SEO ranking. It will not last long though and I bet the big social media companies start monitoring for it happening to your account/page if they detect abuse.

I could see a marketing manager realizing that 100 bucks of personal money could easily earn it back in annual reviews time.

Boosting your followers will not boost your SEO ranking - where did you hear that?

I'm not sure about twitter, but for Facebook fake likes actually hurt you because they use algorithms to figure out what to display and to who. The more fake likes you have, the less likely people who actually liked your page are to have your post show up in their feeds.

I guess this works both ways. Buy a bunch of followers a week before heading to Vegas, then tweet that you can't wait for your trip to #vegas. Watch the promoters start offering you free stuff.

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