Dirty social marketing practice

Social network users usually leisurely gather friends to share links with them and interesting information found on the network. This system, based on loyalty and trust, allows marketers to encourage this feature of potential buyers of the advertised products. People are more likely to trust other people and companies who have many friends in social networks or many views on YouTube. This stimulates artificially overstate these figures, naturally there are people who are ready to help with this. And since true friends trust each other, marketers are trying to penetrate these conversations by offering discounts on products or money, so that people mention the right brands to communicate with their friends. And on the sly, Twitter and Facebook are overwhelmed with such “paid” messages.
Below you will learn about several ways that marketers are actively using.

Friends and Followers for Sale

Anyone who wants to become more popular can try to get followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook by the thousands, and there are many opportunities for that. Twitter is not allowed to sell followers unless the seller has received special permission and has not signed an agreement with the company. They monitor users who have a lot of followers in a short period of time, because most often these people are not worth real people. And for marketing it is very important that as many real people as possible be among the audience.
Services “selling friends” know this and add followers gradually, slowly enough not to attract attention. The owners of such services pay real people a small amount for becoming followers of an account.

Paid messages and status updates

Some marketers have concluded that word of mouth cannot be bought. However, in social networks you can buy the transfer of the necessary information "word of mouth". Marketers pay popular social network users for mentioning products and companies in messages and status updates, attracting large advertisers to such campaigns that have a strong viral effect. This segment is currently considered one of the fastest growing.

Friendship as a financial pyramid

The schemes for the formation of financial pyramids made it possible to attract millions of people to questionable events. The man for the sake of obtaining greater benefits persuaded his friends and acquaintances to "join the game." One of the marketing companies from San Francisco practices similar methods. For a lot of unique links, they suggest people publish them and convince friends to do the same. The person who attracted the most was declared the most influential on the Internet and received some kind of reward. Fast Company magazine in such a campaign promised the “most influential” to put his face on the cover. At the same time, truly influential people on the Internet are unlikely to waste their time on participating in such events.
')

Guaranteed views on YouTube

Anyone who has uploaded his video on YouTube at least once would like his video to be watched as often as possible. And if your company is not satisfied with the number of views of its "viral advertising", there is an opportunity to rectify the situation. The Sharethrough service does not pay users for viewing. Instead, the company is ready to pay remuneration for placing video companies in places where users can stumble upon them without suspecting a trick, and ideally start discussing it with friends, distributing links to everyone they know. This way of advertising has already been used by many large companies with world names and significantly increased the number of views of their videos.

Marketing has always been an important and necessary element of the information flow. On the one hand, why not become part of social media? On the other hand, the structure of social networks based on trust - the most valuable element for marketers - will deteriorate over time, because people's trust is not unlimited.

A source