9 Tactics "Social Media Experts" Use to Scam You 👎

As a rule of thumb for many of these: If the claims are so great, why wouldn’t they just be doing it themselves and for large companies? ;)

Promising Virality

Any social media manager and creator worth anything knows that you cannot guarantee virality. Our agency has repeatedly grown accounts to hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers and we still don’t guarantee virality. Distribution can be guaranteed (how much content you’re creating and posting) but never organic virality. Anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth.

Followers As Proof

How many followers someone has on social media can be a way to gauge if they know what they’re talking about but there’s two ways people can fool you with their follower count:

1. They’ve bought their followers and/or engagement: You would be blown away by how many people selling social media growth courses have 90%-100% fake followers. Or how often major, Fortune 500 brands partner with influencers with millions of fake followers and engagement.

2. They have lots of “ghost followers”: A ghost follower is someone who follows you on social media that does not watch or engage with your content at all. Thanks to the way content is distributed on “For You Pages” it’s easier than ever before for people to go viral with a handful of posts but then get a large influx of “followers” who don’t ever engage with any other content that the creator posts. Creators will use this follower count as a way to prove authority or influence when really they have none.

Before you buy from or partner with a creator with millions of followers, you’re going to want to do your due diligence. There’s a few easy ways you can look into the types of followers a creator has:

• Compare follower count to engagement: Someone with a real, engaged audience will have a consistent level of engagement that isn’t too far off their follower or subscriber count. For example, there’s lot of creators sprinting to 1M Subscriber Plaques on YouTube with Shorts but then they post a long form video and get low tens of thousands of views. That shows there’s a disconnect between followers/subscribers and actual fans.

• Read their comments: If someone is getting no comments… bad sign. If someone is getting lots of comments but they’re all surface level and similar… also a bad sign. Engagement bots all tend to leave the same type of comment. An easy check is to click on the profiles leaving the comments and see if they’re coming from real people or fake accounts.

• Look at their Social Blade: Social Blade is a social media analytics tool. You can search up pretty much any account on any major social media platform and see things like monthly gained likes, gained followers, etc. What you’re looking for here is anomalies. For example, was there a big spike in followers that happened only once? This could show either a large group of followers was bought or a lot of followers came in from one viral post. Sudden growth isn’t always a bad thing, but reference their monthly engagement as well. After the influx of followers, did their engagement increase consistently or spike and go back to normal?

Newsletter Subscribers As Proof

It’s pretty easy to inflate newsletter subscriber numbers. People do this to convince you to sign up for their newsletter or to sell you courses and programs on how to grow your newsletter. But the thing is, it’s not hard to buy email lists and import subscribers that have no relevance to the newsletter.

The two classic metrics people pay attention to are open rate (meh) and click through rate (important). But another metric we’re starting to pay even more attention to is paying subscribers. It’s now easier than ever to launch a paid newsletter and much harder to fake paying subs than regular ones.

Selling Courses to Increase Your Affiliate Sales Quickly

Making good money from affiliate programs where you get paid for every sale you drive through your content is very real. But these “experts” teaching you how to get more affiliate sales don’t have any secrets worth paying for. We’ll give you the secret right here, for free, no course needed:

“MAKE GREAT CONTENT”

There you go, that’s the secret. Great content is what leads to affiliate sales so instead of spending your time and money on an “expert” to show you how to get more sales, focus on getting better at making content.

“Low Effort, High Return”

We see people on X and Instagram daily talking about how you can easily make $10,000/month on YouTube with a Faceless YouTube Channel or on Instagram with a theme page.

But think about it, if it’s so easy, why are they spending all this time and energy to make a one time sale and then teach someone how to make a Faceless YouTube Channel instead of “easily” making another faceless channel that brings in $10,000/month?

Let’s be honest. Can you make $10,000/month with a Faceless YouTube Channel or IG Theme Page? Yes. Can you get their quickly? Maybe. Is it easy? No. In order to grow an account of any kind to a point where it’s making $10,000/month is going to take lots of work. Anyone promising you otherwise is looking at you as their easy way to make money.

“As Featured In”

If you didn’t know, for most publications (yes, even major ones) you can pay to be featured in an article on their website. “Experts” will do this so that they can put “As Featured In”, on their website to give them credibility. Even worse, some people will just put these logos on their website because they don’t expect anyone to verify whether it’s true or not.

As with anything on this list, do a little do diligence. Try to find the article (if it exists), look at who published the article, look at what else they’ve published, etc.

“Generated XYZ Number Of Views”

A new popular example of social proof from “experts” is people touting how many views they are responsible for “generating”. These metrics aren’t necessarily incorrect but there’s so much nuance into what “generating” means. For example:

• Was it short form or long form views? Long form is far more impressive.

• What was their role generating the content? Were they the creator who made the content? Were they editing for someone else? Were they the head editor or the assistant editor?

• How many views was the creator getting before they started working with them? If someone lands a job with MrBeast, they’re pretty much guaranteed to help generate hundreds of millions of views… but that’s not directly because of them.

• Were they posting original content or reposting content generated by someone else that had previously performed well.

If you’re going to work with someone claiming to have generated a certain amount of views, you’re going to want to have these questions answered.

Affiliate Creators

A really sneaky tactic “experts” use to scam you is by incentivizing people who aren’t them to make content promoting their products or courses. This tactic is the exact reason why a couple of years ago Andrew Tate went from unknown to on every single person’s For You Page.

Tate had a course teaching you how to make money. In that course he told you an easy way to make money was by promoting his course on TikTok because you’ll get commission. This is why Andrew Tate videos started flooding the internet, his students were incentivized to make content promoting him. This got new people to take his course… where they were told a great way to make money was to promote the course… and around and around we go.

Be wary when you see someone promoting a product or course that isn’t theirs. There’s a chance they’re only doing it for the money.

Nothing Else Matters But The Metrics

This one isn’t necessarily a “scam” but is something you should watch out for. A lot of “experts” which will teach you about the metrics that matter on the platform and how you should optimize for them. Focusing on the important metrics isn’t wrong, but there’s more that goes into building a brand than just data.

This is common practice with YouTube experts. They teach you to focus on Thumbnail Click-Through-Rate and Average View Duration, which is correct, but they hammer that point to a fault. It becomes about increasing those two metrics and nothing else. What ends up happening is you get to a place where creators are over editing their videos just so the audience doesn’t click away so that their AVD goes up.

This approach doesn’t take into account viewer satisfaction, depth of relationship with your audience (which impacts your influence and how much you can charge for brand deals), etc. There are intangibles that you can’t easily measure that are crucial for long term success on social. If someone isn’t talking about some of these intangibles, it might be a red flag.