Should You Artificially Boost Your Social Media Engagement? EP1

Episode 1 Transcript!

Welcome to the Marketing Combat Podcast. I'm Chris Kubbernus and this is Jason Donnelly. Every single weekday we battle it out for five minutes for your pleasure. The best part, we both know the marketing related topic beforehand, but one of us gets to decide what they're fighting for, which means the other person has to defend something that they may not want to defend.

Today's topic is ethics in artificially boosting engagement. Pay or not to pay. Okay, so I'll tell you why I think it's good to go for it. Fake engagement, okay. The platforms are screwing you. They're screwing you and I. They are artificial, they are, they started this fight. They're artificially suppressing our reach, suppressing our engagement, not letting our content get out to those. So they started this fight, and if they wanted to fight this battle, that's.

That's their fault. I'm just coming in with the same vibe. I'm coming in with the same energy and I'm gonna pay for fake engagement because that will spiral, that will increase my engagement and potentially get me more reach and actual like get me to reach my actual followers, potentially new customers, potentially new people that I want to bring into my community. So I'm going to pay for fake engagement because the platform started this anyway, those, those bastards. Okay. That's fine. You think that you're going to pay for fake engagement. You're going to get fake engagement. So every, every single, platform out there, every single brand out there, everybody's saying, I need to be authentic. I need to be real. I need to be, I need to be truthful. And then we go out there and we say,

I mean we got a hundred thousand likes on this and none of them are real they're all bots but That's the fake part. Yeah, but I don't know how many of those things how many of those there's gonna be something out there That's like showing that this brand used the fake engagement bots this brand used the fake engagement bots So all these people are see the content are gonna say well, this isn't even real. They don't care I mean like how many sure how many fake Instagram followers does Kylie Jenner have how many fake follower Kim Kardashian six?

Eight? don't Eight million. All of these famous people, they've shown this actually, they've done studies on it. They're like, The Rock has 20 % of his followers, Taylor Swift's 20, 30 % of her followers are bots or fake engagement, fake followers. We're just talking about follower numbers now. The thing is, that's not deterring anybody from buying a Taylor Swift out. That's not deterring anybody from going to the latest Rock move. So it's like, we've come to sort of accept that there's some fake engagement in there, specifically when it comes to famous people. So it's like, as a brand, competing against the rock, the Taylor Swift's for attention.

So it's like, might as well play that same game. Here's the thing. I hear you, but like when we're talking about artificial likes versus pay for likes, for reach, reach and artificial likes are different. And I think that's where the, the most important part is. think if a brand goes out there and they say, we're gonna pay for reach, this is not organic, we're just gonna go long, we want this to be in front of as many people as possible, and hope that they're making content that's good enough to get likes, totally down. But if you're going out, you see, do see the background?

Even the AI is like, I get it, I understand. Anyway, so my issue is the second that you got like hundreds of thousands of these fake, I'm so angry I spit, all these fake likes, it's not even people liking it, and then what does it mean?Especially for your heart. That's right. Brands. Doesn't it break your heart? I'm not going to comment on that. Brands don't have a heart. Brands have heart? Heart is a marketing ploy. Heart is a, we're so good for the world and that's marketing. All the brands that I've ever worked with here at CubCo have heart.

Sure, I completely, I'm not arguing that point. But going back to our, the fake engagement, I'll go back to my first point. The platforms are messing with you, they're suppressing your reach. They won't even let you reach their followers. Like you can grab, you can grow as many followers as you want, but.

They're not going to, you're not going to be able to reach them. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. They're just going to like, we're going to suppress it because your content's not good enough. That's BS. The content hasn't changed. It's all good. You are just trying to get more money out of me to pay for advertising. Cause I know it knows that you're a brand. It knows that you have money. It knows that, okay. You've got a few million in your marketing budget. Why not, you know, send it our way. And the numbers don't lie. mean, Facebook's profit last year was like $13 billion. That's all from adverts. That's all advertising.

So they have no reason to let you reach your audience. So you can either decide to pay a fake farm to give you engagement and then hopefully your real engagement comes, or you can pay face. What do you want to do? In my mind, it's like, pay to play anyway. So it's either you're paying.

A fake engagement place, or you're paying face, you decide what's better for you ethically, what's better for you commercially, what's better for you heart -wise. I just think it's probably better to pay some sort of farm because then you're not just paying the platform to keep screwing you. Personally, I'm gonna keep paying the platform to keep screwing me because I want real people to see my great content and love it. What do you, the audience, watching this thing? Are real though? Are they real though? You gotta think of that.

Okay, I know we're not on this topic, but are they real though? Because listen, there's been lots of studies that say like the clicks that you get from advertising on social or advertising in general, something like 30 % of those are fake. So are you actually advertising on people? You're breaking my heart again. Sorry, but I had to take a position on this. Well, let's play the platform and that's where we go. This is visiting out. Listen, let us know in the comments, who do you think won this marketing battle? Me, Chris Kubbernus.

or the art. We want fake engagement. We want to pay the bots. You have to decide, what do I actually believe? That's a topic for another day. You don't even believe what you're saying right now. Tune in tomorrow for the next Marketing Combat podcast episode. We're going to talk about another marketing topic. Someone's going to take a devil's advocate position. Someone's going to be on the right side of the argument. We don't know who, but you'll never know. Tune in tomorrow to find out. Thanks for listening. See you guys.