Publish at July 23 2017 Updated October 31 2024
This article starts with a surprise. A large meat and charcuterie processing company communicates on Twitter, and many people retweet its messages.
But who are they? Where do they come from? What motivates someone to associate their digital image with food advertisements? But is there really a "someone" behind these messages?
Tweeting is time-consuming, and if your mission is to share information, convince and occupy the field on a theme, you're quickly overwhelmed. So why not program a robot to tweet for you?
Some have taken the plunge: RobotribunauxQC is based on a robot that checks every hour to see which court decisions have been published in Quebec, and creates a tweet with a link to the decision... Over 40,000 tweets and barely 500 followers... Not yet convincing. The messages lose a few precious characters by starting almost every tweet with: "new court decision" and lack precision on the nature of the decision.
More circumscribed in its ambition, but more effective (around 500 tweets and 2,600 subscribers), AcomcastUser has created an application that automatically tweets whenever the connection speed of Comcast, its ISP, is lower than advertised.
No ambiguity for these accounts. Their monotony leaves no doubt: they are home-grown programmed robots, and the authors make no secret of it. Nothing prevents the creation of applications that retweet or simply follow.
A political figure running for office with fewer than 3,000 followers would not appear serious. Social network regulars would wonder. So buying a few thousand followers can be a good investment!
12 euros - that's how much 1,000 tweet followers cost with most companies that sell you friends by the thousands. Dummy, dormant accounts that artificially inflate your follower count. This type of proposal also exists for Facebook and other networks, and for increasing the number of views of your YouTube videos by tens of thousands.
But what's the point? It's quite simple. We have a mimetic behavior. If someone has a large following, we perceive them as an influencer... and we follow them back. These companies are simply tapping into the follower's following.
Hackisitor 's practices appear more humane. According to criteria defined with their customers, they propose a selection of accounts. Hackisitor leads the company to follow them, and as the following is reciprocal, there's a good chance that these people will in turn subscribe to the Hackisitor customer's account. All that's left for the customer to do is unsubscribe from accounts that haven't opted for reciprocity.
Social Dynamite coordinates the actions of the company's "ambassadors". Salespeople, employees and other stakeholders can pool their resources to make the company's action on the networks more effective. Julien Carlier heads this company. He explains that we have all become media through our social network accounts.
Employees and partners are therefore invited to select the messages they wish to relay, and Social Dynamite will take care of organizing and harmonizing the whole. The idea is to build a scenario. The message will start with one person, on a Facebook account for example. Five minutes later, it will be "liked" by another person in the company, then picked up by his or her manager. A few hours later, on another network, the same message will be shared by another account, and the plan is to keep it going, to get ripples and maintain attention on the message.
Employees will do well to open dedicated accounts, which are not confused with the space where they share with friends and family. Because if they become ambassadors, it's easy to imagine that the company will make sure that the editorial line and general tone of the "media" carrying their message are respected. On the other hand, if employees communicate via their own accounts, their freedom of expression is likely to be seriously curtailed!
To keep the robots at bay and avoid accounts that are more concerned with statistics than the relevance of their messages, we need to review our choice of "friends". And perhaps we should start by giving up on accounts whose strategy is too calculated to make numbers and attract new followers. Let's give preference to contributors who communicate on what they feel is important and who want to share, without optimizing each of their messages. We prefer people who seem to know their "friends", and who interact with them.
For the sake of efficiency, we can also draw on Ricardo da Silva's advice. Use "hashtags", refer to other people, use images, and be careful when you send your messages... These methods are all part of good communication, whereas buying friends and sending automated messages can be discrediting, once the recipient of the message spots the ploy.
Illustrations: Frédéric Duriez
Resources
Ricardo da Silva Fifteen Twitter tricks to get more Retweets, favorites and clicks - accessed January 17, 2017
http://ricardodasilva.fr/15-astuces-twitter-avoir-retweets-favoris-clics/
wikihow "how to get more followers on Twitter"
http://fr.wikihow.com/obtenir-plus-d'abonn%C3%A9s-sur-Twitter
To buy followers by the thousands
Alban Jarry "Viser le ricochet en communication" published on June 20, 2016, accessed January 20, 2017
http://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/cercle-158100-viser-le-ricochet-en-communication-2007880.php
Guillaume Dardier "Social Dynamite, a social media bomb" published April 2013, accessed January 21, 2017
http://guillaume-dardier.fr/social-dynamite.html
Sylvain Lembert "Comment scénariser votre communication sur les réseaux sociaux?" published April 2013, accessed January 21, 2017
http://www.webmarketing-com.com/2013/04/04/19993-comment-scenariser-communication-reseaux-sociaux
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