Engagement Bait: Black-Hat SMM Practice

With the rise of social media marketing, there are many SMM specialists using black hat SMM techniques. The engagement bait is one the most widely used black hat technique by some social media marketing manager. In today’s article, we will share what does this mean and how it actually works?

What is social engagement?
Before getting into detail of engagement bait, it is necessary to define what engagement means in social media context.

When a post shared is very interesting or informative, users start leaving likes and comments; moreover, they share the post with their social network. These reactions received from social media users are called social engagement.

What is engagement bait?
When a post inorganically increases engagement it is called engagement bait. In simpler words, it means the post is not that interesting or informative, but the post is created in a way that users put likes or comments on the posts.

Types of Engagement Bait are listed below:

• Comment baiting
• Tag baiting
• Vote baiting
• Share baiting
• React baiting

Below are a few examples of engagement baiting for better understanding:

• Putting some emotional post and asking people to put comment or like to increase awareness or fund raising to help the needed. For example, the kid in the picture has severe dieses and needs money. To help her put like and share this post with your network; one like will give her one dollar.
• Putting funny posts that encourage comments. For example, People whose name start with ‘A’ will take you to trip of Amsterdam. Tag people whose name starts with ‘A’.
• Putting a lucrative job offer and asking you to tag your profile.
• Putting a message saying they are creating a WhatsApp group of professionals and ask you to leave your number in the comments.

There are many as such posts went viral over social channels and occasionally you might have participated with such posts.

Why do they do it?
There can be different reasons for performing engagement baiting. Some of them are listed below:

• Some social media users do engagement baiting unknowingly with a reason to gain a lot of likes/comments/shares because they enjoy getting viral.
• Professional social media marketers use this practice to boost their other posts of the page because according to social networking algorithms, the page’s post getting more engagement gets more exposure.
• They are collecting data of professionals working with specific skills or domain. The database then gets sold to third part because you are sharing it with your own agreement and consent to use it.

What is its impact?
It increases page likes, followers and fans. They get genuine database and money as well when they sell it. On the contrary, there is no negative impact on them because the social algorithm doesn’t punish such pages or posts for such black hat practices.

However, the recent update launched by Facebook claim that it will stop showing this kind of engagement bait posts on the user’s home feed.

Should you use it?
There are three different types of users of social networking website and here are three different answers for each type of social user.

Users: As a social media user, you should refrain participating in such link-bait posts because 1. You are encouraging bad practices 2. They get your consent of using/selling your profile and other shared details. These details may get misused.

Like lovers: There are a few crazy social media users who know nothing and just want to receive hundreds to millions of likes and comments on their posts. They are doing it for fun. If you are doing it for fun, go ahead and create a funny post which would be called engagement bait in the social media marketing industry.

SMM Professionals: If you are an SMM expert offering professional social media management and marketing services, then you should refrain from performing as such activities as there is no benefit of it. Even if you will generate thousands of likes, it will be useless for professional services. The users tagging and sharing on such posts are not looking for any professional services or solutions, so it will be useless at a certain point.

Instead of this you can use polling and surveys related to your industry and product to increase engagement as that will increase genuine user base who is actually interested in your business or service.

It is time consuming to increase user base with white-hat marketing practices, but it is always more fruitful and worth.

Looking for professional social media marketing services? Get in touch to discuss more.

About Author: Ash Vyas

Ash Vyas has 10+ years of practical experience in digital marketing and international business development. She has written 100s of articles on various topics to live her passion of helping people with her knowledge and expertise. In addition to directing Digital Marketers India, Ash also delivers keynote sessions and holds key positions in some international companies as a consultant, director of operations and mentor.

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