Unveiling the Dark Side: 5+ Black Hat Social Media Techniques Your Brand Should Never Use

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have become important tools for brands to connect and engage with their audience. Unfortunately, some brands try to cut corners and use “black hat” tactics to boost their social media presence. These tactics are unethical, can severely damage the brand’s reputation and in some cases, can even result in account suspension. In this blog post, we will discuss some of the most common black hat social media techniques that your brand should never use.

Fake Followers

One of the most common black hat social media tactics is buying fake followers. This involves purchasing followers from third-party services to artificially inflate your follower count. Fake followers can be spotted easily, as they have no engagement with your content and often look fake, with profiles lacking profile photos, and follows tons of other low-quality accounts. Most black hat social media agencies or individuals claim that purchasing such followers will help boost organic appearance and make the brand look more popular, but what they hide from you is that a massive number of low-quality followers can also affect the brands’ reach and engagement, and most brands never achieve the results they hoped to achieve.

Instead of buying fake followers, brands should focus on attracting real, organic followers by providing value-added content that resonates with their audience, and also ensure they’re targeting and posting content to their ideal target audience.

Fake Engagement

Another black hat social media technique is the use of fake engagement, which involves buying likes, comments, and shares to create the impression of vast organic following and engagement. Large fake engagement numbers are usually easy to spot, as they usually come from low-quality and irrelevant profiles that do not represent the brand’s target audience. Engagement is a vital part of social media marketing, and it’s essential to understand that fake engagements can damage the credibility and reputation of the brand beyond repair.

Instead of buying fake engagements, brands should focus on engagement strategies, that create valuable content, ask questions, or start real conversations with their ideal audience, and engaging with existing followers is an excellent way to increase the authenticity and credibility of the brand.

Keyword Stuffing and Hashtag Spamming

Keyword stuffing is an old SEO trick, which involves adding too many keywords intentionally into content or the brand’s social media profiles, to trick search engines into ranking them higher. Similarly, hashtag stuffing or spamming, which is another black hat tactic that involves adding too many irrelevant hashtags to a single post.

However, the social media algorithms are smart enough to detect this kind of black hat practice, and this will result in a lower reach for the brand’s content or account. In other worst cases scenarios, Search engines may even penalize such profiles for violating their user policies.

Rather than using such unethical practices, brands should focus on using a sensible and reasonable amount of keywords in their social media profiles and content. They should also use relevant hashtags that fit their content and practice optimal hashtag solutions for their platforms such as 2-3 Hashtags for Facebook, 9 for Instagram, 3 for Twitter

Stealing Content

Stealing content is never justifiable! It is wrong and unethical. It’s important to create unique content that relates to your brand and audience because it’s the foundation of social media marketing. Using someone else’s ideas, images or content, and presenting it as your own is unethical, and it destroys the credibility and reputation of your company.

Instead, brands should focus on creating original and quality content that brings unique value to the audience. Furthermore, if brands tend to share other creators’ content, they should give proper credit by tagging the person or business and linking their original content sources.

Avoiding Moderation and Ignoring Negative Feedbacks

Ignoring negative feedback is another black hat tactic that many brands tend to indulge in. Turning away from negative feedback and reviews on social media, pretending it never happened or deleting them shows a lack of concern and empathy to the audience. It only adds fuel to the fire and usually triggers more criticism and negative feedback. Such negligence can also hurt the brand’s reputation and credibility among their existing audience.

Instead of avoiding criticism, brands should be proactive in addressing customer feedback and comments, good or bad. Responding quickly and openly, being empathetic, and attempting to resolve customer problems is essential. It also shows the audience that the brand is paying attention to what they have to say and is eager to find solutions to their concerns.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is no shortcut to success in social media marketing. The black hat social media practices mentioned above can create short-term benefits, but they will ultimately lead to long-term damage to your brand. To succeed on social media, brands should focus on developing a robust organic social media strategy that incorporates smart investing, timely execution, proper monitoring, and periodic analysis of results. By taking an honest approach to social media marketing, brands can build trust, authenticity, and credibility, and earn the respect and attention of their audience.