The risks: your “shadowbanned” or closed Instagram account, 2 years' imprisonment and/or a $ 37,500 fine, a Google penalty, a bad buzz.
Digital has become so complex today that the attraction of certain shortcuts is powerful, in particular, because the participation of companies is motivated by commercial intentions.
Better to avoid these 4 bad practices that can cause serious damage to your company's digital strategy.
1. Use bots
In their race to achieve their goals, many companies in 2019 still do not understand the peculiarities of each channel and treat them consistently.
In addition, if certain specialties allow obtaining results quickly (this is the case of media buying), others, such as social media marketing or referencing, are medium and long-term strategies. For better results get social media marketing services.
From my perspective, any attempt to shorten this development cycle falls into the twists and turns of the gray and black hat techniques.
I specify here that I have nothing against automation services in general. I myself use it, for example, to post content on a regular basis throughout the year.
However, I disapprove of the use of tools that generate inauthentic activities, bring out bad practices, and circumvent the rules set by social networks.
What are the promises of these platforms? Mainly, increase your community with "real" subscribers and boost your engagement.
Understand "welcome to the era of" auto ": auto-like, auto-follow, auto-unfollow, auto-comment, auto-repost, auto-DM, auto" you name it ".
Know that the use of bots is not trivial. If you are concerned, you risk seeing your account "shadowbannée" or closed. In addition, it is easy to know if you are using this type of service. In terms of image, you will agree that there is better.
Lately, I was approached several times by one of these companies as part of a request for a sponsored article.
While this solution has been covered on other social media-focused blogs, it won't find its place here.
However, my blog also depends in part on the income generated by paid partnerships.
But for 10 years, I have always made it a point of honor to objectively recommend reliable, qualitative tools that comply with the rules for using social platforms.
2. Impose non-legal conditions in sponsored tickets
The sponsored post is an article relating to a brand, a product, or a service, written at the request of an advertiser, as part of a paid partnership or in exchange for merchandise for example.
Companies use this device to achieve various objectives: increasing the notoriety of a brand or a product/service, reaching a targeted audience, increasing traffic to their website, etc.
When companies contact bloggers, some of them indicate a list of requirements for the article written, for example, the omission of the contractual relationship.
In US, the law requires that the sponsored article be clearly identifiable as such so that the reader knows its advertising nature (article L.121-1 of the Consumer Code and article 20 of the Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy).
In the event of non-compliance with the law, the advertiser is held responsible, but the author may see his criminal liability engaged. The addition is heavy: 2 years imprisonment at most and/or $ 37,500 fine.
3. Manipulate the ranking of a site in the search results
As you could see in the screenshot above, the company asked me to add a dofollow link pointing to their site from the sponsored post.
This attribute is therefore important for the net linking and referencing of a website in Google.
However, the search engine does appreciate links intended to manipulate PageRank ranking.
Several methods are concerned: link exchanges, buying or selling links, writing articles as a guest, with keyword-rich anchor text links, etc.
If you want to avoid a penalty, go your way and prioritize unique, quality content on your website.
4. Buy fans or subscribers
Popularity, when you hold us.
Whether it's a business starting out on social media, a brand that wants to stand out from its competitor or an influencer looking for paid partnerships, buying fans and subscribers is still practiced today.
This practice has several negative points.
On the one hand, the size of the community never rhymes with commitment. And in this case, generating engagement is an even more difficult task when the community is inactive or unqualified.
Because make no mistake: engagement is the target goal. Not the size of the community.
In addition, having a partially inactive community impacts the analysis of your results. This makes it very difficult to measure whether your actions are effective.
Additionally, buying fans or subscribers hurts branding and authenticity - apart from the latter has become a yardstick for success on social media.
Finally, social platforms carry out purges to eliminate, for example, inauthentic and inactive accounts. Companies lose their financial investment and sometimes have to publicly justify this situation .