Social media: the real and the fake

by Steve Keenan

Here’s a barnstorming headline: 15% of social media reviews will be fake by 2014: report

The report from Gartner suggests that as brands are increasingly turning to paying for positive reviews, ‘Likes’ and followers on popular social networking sites, there is a growing market among agencies and marketers who are willing to provide such reviews.

It’s a subject I discussed just last Friday with a delegate at the BrightonSEO conference, where 1,300 Seo-ers heard speakers address just-about-anything-other than ‘Black Hat’ (eg., dodgy) practises that have been so prevalant in the industry. But over a coffee, he told me that ‘of course’ the market does exist.

“We’re clean in providing original and genuine content, and advise clients to do so. But if a brand wants a ‘quick hit’ in building followers, and offer my agency half a million pounds to do so, do you think my bosses are going to turn it down?”

The only direct reference at the conference to Black Hats came from Rebecca Weeks, Associate Director for Manning Gottlieb OMD, who was asked by a client to do just that: build a big following in 52 weeks, by whatever means.

So her team spent ages building dodgy links, using keyword stuffing and cloaking tactics - and then Google issued updates to its algorithims and the work fell over. So her team came clean: “Without good content, you are never going to close the gap (to the top of Google rankings),” she told the conference.

It’s an obvious dilemma. Creating good, clean and original content to improve ranking takes time and lots of money. And many CEOs and CFOs are averse to both of those suggestions. So an industry exists and, as Gartner suggests, it will continue to grow.

Another speaker said that the best way to operate is to sit down and talk to the company client, asking them over what period its marketing plan runs over, what their expectations are and what are the targets. Then the agency can devise a social media and SEO plan to match. All well and good.

But given a lack of time or money, there is another way brands are starting make an impact - by keeping tabs on the opposition. There are several ways now to track other websites, to check their behaviour and - if necessary - call the Google police and report a crime. In old money, to snitch on your rival.

The tools available are wide-ranging - and can equally be used by bloggers and SME companies to find out the worst - and best - of rival practises.

The most impressive speaker in Brighton was Berian Reed, head of search marketing at Auto Trader UK.

Here are his top four takeaways:

1. “The most common way of sharing content is copy and paste,” he said. So use Tynt, which ensures that any copy pasted into another site links back to your original article. And you can then find out who’s been using your copy.
2. Use changedetection.com - a free service that monitors any website page for changes, so you can keep abreast of the competition and what they’re doing. And, as Reed pointed out: “It’s a useful way to make sure you haven’t been hacked.”
3. A new tool, released only two months ago, is Socialcrawlytics.com, which tells you which of your rival’s pages have been shared the most and on which social networks. Look and learn, as they say.
4. Berian also mentioned Linkdetective.com - and as the site says: “Put their websites under the magnifying glass and see EXACTLY which of their strategies YOU could easily copy to climb to the top of the search engines!” Which is pretty clear.

Another speaker, from Rocket Mill, suggested other tools to use: Topsy (searches content on Twitter and the web, sorted by relevance or date); Backtweets.com (search for links on Twitter); Datasift (as the name suggests).

So if you can’t afford to create all that shiny, lovely new content, then at least you can check and learn from the opposition with accepted tools. And then your site may not have to be one of those contributing to one in six ‘fake’ social media reviews within just two years.