LOS ANGELES—In the quest to get tweets seen and increase social proof, every Twitter account encounters bots. A bot is an automated Twitter account. But what are they really? What do they do? What do they do to you? These are common questions surrounding the life of bots.
At its most basic, a Twitter bot is an automated Twitter account that tweets according to its programming. At its most complex, it is an automated Twitter account that can spread propaganda, influence elections, cause panic, and enable hacking. There are fun bots that tweet haikus at you, or the “your mom” bot that responds randomly to tweets with the simple reply “your mom." There are spam bots that start tweeting links at you after you mention hot keywords like iPhone or Equifax in an attempt to get you to buy something that will likely do nothing but cost you money and try to gather your information for an email spam campaign. There are the social proof bots that retweet a lot. These can be used to spread a link around the Twitterverse, increase social proof by giving your tweets a high retweet number, or even to influence trending hashtags and affect the Twitter search algorithm (If you are interested in organically affecting the Twitter search algorithm to increase your CTR, check out the FAD Algorithm, which is the only algorithm that socially engineers Twitter's search for better click through rate and social SEO).
Bots that influence trending hashtags can help spread fake news and misinformation. After the Las Vegas shooting someone tweeted #LasVagasShooting and the bots started retweeting the misspelled hashtag, as did other people. It gained so much momentum that it became a trending hashtag on Twitter and reporters started using the misspelled hashtag. Essentially the social proof provided by the bots began to legitimize the hashtag and it gained influence. This is also how dangerous misinformation can be spread.
The bots range from innocuous and annoying to potentially dangerous with real-world effects. Twitter actively fights against bots. The company regularly performs bot account purges a few times a year that suspends accounts suspected to be bots. They recently did this on a large scale and were aggressive in their scope due to a crackdown on using bots to spread fake news, causing most Twitter accounts to see dips in their Twitter following—and especially large dips for those that purchased fake followers.
If you are in porn, you cannot avoid bots following you. Adult accounts use words that are targeted by bots. Don’t worry about your bot followers. They will likely be purged by Twitter at some point and they won’t harm your account in the meantime. Bot tweet accounts are mainly spam. People use them as a way to get their links tweeted out more. I see this a lot in white-label cams and dating. The problem is that low quality bot accounts are easy to spot because they don’t engage and only tweet crap promo tweets with automated writing. The CTR is low to nothing. It’s a strategy that may have had effectiveness five years ago, but now has none.
In the life of Twitter bots, know that they will eventually be purged. Using them to tweet your links can risk getting your link flagged as spam. Using them to increase your followers is typically a short-term solution because your follow count will take a huge hit when a purge happens. Most people don’t follow bot accounts, so their retweets may look good for your retweet count but is not really helping increase exposure to a buying audience. Plus, bots don’t buy anything. Ignore the bots, unless you find a funny one to mess with, and focus on a quality Twitter strategy. In the world of social media, quality strategy is what gets you the numbers in the end.
If you would like to discuss your social media strategy, please email [email protected]. 7 Veils does everything from small batch tweet writing to full strategy and social management. It is social media for any budget.
