To bot or not? That is the question.

A few years ago I started noticing a greater and greater number of people following me on social media and then un-following me again the next day, as well as leaving generic, random, and meaningless comments on my posts.  The amount of times this was happening to per day was growing and I was confused as to what exactly was happening until I learned about bots.

Bots are systems that people use to increase the followers and growth on their accounts by creating automated engagement.

For example, you can pay to have an automated system that comments on other peoples’ posts, follows and unfollows, likes photos and even can send direct messages.  This automated engagement runs 24/7 and maximizes your growth potential on social media, but can also be very spammy and annoying for your fellow social media users.

Using bots is a form of guerilla marketing in that it’s not technically allowed under most social media user agreements including Instagram and Facebook, yet is still very hard to be tracked and therefore hundreds of thousands of people are using them every day.

Technically I cannot recommend you use bots, but I will note some of the advantages or disadvantages of using social media bots purely for informational purposes.

Advantages Of Using Bots

  • You can gain lots of followers more quickly than you possibly could organically through your own personal engagement.
  • You can spend less time on social media and let the bot manage your engagements to grow your account.
  • You can use automated DM bots to send messages for marketing purposes instead of manually messaging people to start the conversation.
  • You can greatly increase the number of likes and comments on your social media posts because more people are viewing your account.

Dis-Advantages Of Using Bots

  • The automated engagements can come across as spammy and annoying to the general public.
  • People are becoming more and more aware of bots and can more easily recognize fake engagement, so the results can dwindle.
  • Overuse of bots or too much engagement can cause your account to be temporarily flagged or even permanently shut in the worst case although rarely happens if managed properly.
  • It’s technically against the user agreement to use bots and you would be breaking the user rules.