The worst thing about social media is that likes, fans, and reviews can be faked. It also seems like this trend is going to continue and it’s going to get a lot worse. Who knows, it could start the domino effect that would destroy social media forever. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, analysts predict that by 2014 10%-15% of the reviews and social media interactions will be fake and will be paid for by the companies.
Ed Thompson, Gartner analyst and Co-author of the report say that at the moment around 1%-4% of the social media is paid for. This is alarming, imagine a world where whatever you read about something is positive, and that way you no longer will have the true picture. Only after buying the product/service you will truly know what it is really like.
Looking to see if a company has fake followers and everything has become more of a pastime, and sites like fake follower check from StatusPeople have got the figures to tell just how many fake followers and “paid†reviews a company has got.
However, there are two sides to this game and there are some companies that are promoting the idea of being paid to tweet or share or like. Companies like Ad.ly work with celebrities, while Izea’s gives sponsored tweets to promote brands. A company named PaidPerTweet even goes the extra mile and offers coupons and other promotions.
It’s like you are seeing ads everywhere, and that sooner or later this will need to be regulated.
With the fact that people are now spending so much time online, brands are ever so in the need to target people and they are doing everything they can to promote themselves. Companies want more hits, more likes, more shares, more positive reviews, and its seems like they will stop at nothing to get what they need.
Although the government regulation bodies can do their part, it’s basically up to social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and others to play their part and help in regulating fake profile and fake reviews. They will need to think in terms of the long run and focus on what needs to be done to stop this from becoming a major problem.
There has been the rise of paid reputation defense as well, as negative reviews get replied and then they are tried to be made more positive. However, what would happen if the company pays people to write both good and bad reviews to offset the effect and make things look more authentic?
It seems as if social media is going to require some major changes otherwise all we will be seeing on the internet will be advertisements in one way or the other.
