The first thing you do as a social media manager taking over a new account is to conduct an audit. What if that audit reveals your account has massive bot activity including hundreds of engagements from very obvious bot accounts on every post? I reached out to groups managed by Facebook itself to figure out if others experienced this and how they went about cleaning it. I also reached out to social media advertising contracting agencies. They said many big organizations experience large bot activity, no big deal. But it is a huge deal if a large percentage of all engagement and follows/likes on your page are bots. It would be impossible to grow your presence unless you bought bots or continued allowing them to run rampant on your page. So, I researched and read message boards. I began testing and these were the steps I took to exterminate them. Here are my best practices garnered from research and my own trial and error.
“Hello, Bots…” How to Spot Bots
There are many indicators of bot activity and even so it might be hard, without clicking into individual profiles, to determine whether an account is authentic or not. Here are some questions to ask as you’re hovering over profile photos:
Does the account have a profile photo?
Does the account have a location listed or any other ‘About’ information filled out?
Does place of work on the account list ‘Facebook App,’ ‘Student’ ‘(insert city name) Football Club (FC),’ NBA other pro-sports entities or big fashion brand retail chains?
Does the education tab on the account list an ivy league school for example Harvard, Duke or Oxford, or unnamed state/government college?
Is the account name listed a repetition of itself or something to the effect of ‘Harry Potter’ or ‘Albert Einstein,’ with the title ‘Sheriff’ or ‘Prince’ etc.?
These are just a few indicators and by no means rule out a profile being authentic, just patterns that arose in my own search. My barometer for whether to remove/block an account from my follows as a marketer is how well the account fits my target audience profile. I ask myself the following questions to determine whether I am attracting the audience that I want to:
Am I attracting an audience that will purchase my product or engage meaningfully with my content?
If I have a physical storefront or other reason to target an audience based on location, what value would an audience from outside that target market bring to my social accounts?
How am I pulling in this alternative audience?
Is this alternative audience a potential opportunity to expand my business’ offerings or is it negatively affecting my ability to reach my target audience?
Your answers to these questions will help you determine how you deal with the situation. Depending on what your product or service is, will determine who your audience is and how that audience would engage with your brand.
Why Remove Bots?
The Facebook algorithm is a very fickle thing in the best of circumstances. If you’ve determined beyond a doubt that engagement with your account is coming from inauthentic sources, accounts that follow your page are affecting the algorithm. Therefore, any reporting you do on followers, engagement, impressions etc. is affected as well.
Facebook only feeds your content to a small percentage of your followers because your page is competing with all other content your followers follow. If your audience is inauthentic, Facebook is likely sharing the majority of the content you work hard on creating to bots,
Facebook also cleans up. If other pages have reported bots on their pages that also happen to be engaging with your account and these are determined by Facebook to be bots, they may flag your account as a spam account should you have a large majority of followers of this type.
How to Exterminate Bots
Moderate Your Page Audience
Using the previously mentioned criteria, go into your Page Settings > General > Page Moderation settings and sift through your Followers list. You can check the box next to any account you deem inauthentic and, once finished, remove the entire batch by scrolling back up to the top right of the page. Click the ‘Settings’ icon next to the search bar and select ‘Remove from page likes’ or ‘Ban from page.’ This is a tedious and time-consuming process.
If you are having consistent new bot activity, you might need to repeat this process over a period of time. I suggest checking back every other day until there is a drop-off in the number of inauthentic follows per day.
Fun Fact: I did determine through this process that some bots will duplicate the exact same account information including the photo. I found as many as six of the exact same account batched in succession.
Restrict Location-Based Bot Activity
Audit the posts with bot engagement and determine the locations with the greatest bot activity from those tagged in accounts. Add that list under Page Settings > General > Country Restrictions. This will ensure no accounts with that location in their profile will be able to engage with or see your content.
Reasons to Keep Bots / Why Are Bots Created
I only see two reasons why anyone would choose to keep, buy or market to bots on their page.
If they were making a significant profit from video views and the pay per video view was high enough to make the cost offset of false account engagement/follows worth it.
If the bot activity improved the account’s Facebook algorithm enough that there was a significant increase in authentic followers/engagement.
I would, however, caution that this action might subject your authentic followership to their accounts being hacked or cloned as well by these bots as I observed.
Preventative Measures
Maybe your page does not have bots right now, but you want to protect your page from becoming infested in the future. Here are some ideas for things you can do now:
Add an extensive list of bad words to Page Settings > General > Page Moderation Monitor the accounts liking your page on a consistent basis in Page Settings > General > Page Moderation
Practice community management and social listening to stay on top of comments and engagements with your posts