In recent years, social media has become the go-to machinery for information sharing among people and nations. Due to its digital nature, interacting is made easier and responding does not take a while. During this pandemic, all the more that people turn to social mediaah to share their stories, communicate with their friends and loved ones, or simply get their messages across. However, the rise in social media consumers also meant the increase of spurious accounts that do not provide genuine engagement with other users. These are known as social media bots.

What Are Social Media Bots?

While bots are automated accounts generated through system codes, social media bots are automated accounts created to increase social media engagement.

Companies now utilize coding knowledge to dominate the online influencing trend, offering to provide bots in bulk to do various things, be it bad or good. To this end, popular social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have mechanisms in place to spot bots and remove them from their respective platforms.

What Are the Functions of Social Media Bots?

People who make use of bots have a varying purpose in doing so. Below is a list of some of the uses and functions of social media bots.

Facilitate commercial activities

Social media bots can be used to facilitate commercial activities, be it on social networking sites like Instagram or even online web stores. Online shops now set up chatbots programmed to expedite company-to-customer interaction by sending automated messages or answer queries from potential customers. After a while, a real agent attends to these patrons.

Promote an organization or person

One of the common uses of social media bots is to increase the popularity of an organization or a person. This is common on Instagram, where it is easy to post, share stories, and like and comment on other people’s photos. This also finds relevance because big brands prefer working with personalities and content creators with huge followers.

Spread information

Social media bots are also used to spread information or misinformation, sway public opinion, or propagate harassment or hate speech. You may find most of this content on Twitter, where people now turn to for views and engagements on topics like social issues or the latest products by popular commercial brands.

How Can You Spot the Difference?

It is challenging to conclude that an account is a bot, but here are some indicators that may help business owners check if their bot seems authentic:

Look at the account information or profile

Looking at the profile is one of the fastest ways to check for social media bots. More often than not, bots do not have an original photo as a profile photo. Instead, they use generic pictures or pictures of celebrities as their default photo. Moreover, check the account creation date. If it is recent and has suspicious content, it may be a bot. An inactive account created years back with a sudden erratic change in their activity may also be a social media bot.

Read the account’s posts

It helps to read the user’s posts. Bots usually sound formulaic. They use repetitive language that sounds awkward or incomprehensible sometimes. Moreover, you may be dealing with a bot if the account just reposts a huge chunk of content or posts a few words followed by an abundance of hashtags.

Track the followers and activity

Checking the timeline of a suspicious account may help. One way to know whether you are dealing with a bot on social media is to check their followers. Do these people comment the same thing or hashtag over and over? Does the account follow significantly more people but only a few follow back? Is the account active throughout the day? Those are indicators that the account may be a bot.

These tips may prove useful, but they are merely indicators. They are not conclusive; at the end of the day, you will have to use your own free will and best judgment to see for yourself whether or not you are dealing with bots. For business owners, these are things to avoid. It is best to employ only a semi-automated social media bot that still needs user interaction to ensure authentic engagement.

Interested to know on how many are real accounts and how many are bots? Read ”How Many Accounts on Social Media are Bots?” to learn more.