The best issue that at any time took place to social media marketing and advertising was the hacking of the 2016 US election of Donal Trump by the Russians. Why? Because it laid bare what several in social media marketing and advertising has acknowledged for a prolonged, prolonged time: that social media platforms are a joke, their valuations are primarily based on imaginary customers, and their integrity lies someplace in between Lucifer and that guy who eats people’s faces in the motion pictures.

For marketing consultants this sort of as myself, recommending current social platforms such as Fb, Twitter, and Instagram has been increasingly challenging, simply because -fairly frankly- several of us don’t have confidence in the metrics.

And why need to we? Fb will not.

This is from Facebook’s 2017 SEC submitting (emphasis mine):

The quantities for our essential metrics, which incorporate our everyday lively users (DAUs), monthly active users (MAUs), and regular income for each person (ARPU), are calculated utilizing interior organization info primarily based on the exercise of consumer accounts. Even though these quantities are dependent on what we imagine to be realistic estimates of our consumer foundation for the applicable interval of measurement, there are inherent problems in measuring usage of our items across big on the internet and cellular populations about the globe.
The premier data management organization in the world states it will not genuinely know if its figures are accurate. Estimates? What advertising professional wants believed outcomes soon after the truth?

It gets even worse. Emphasis mine:

In the fourth quarter of 2017, we estimate that replicate accounts may have represented roughly ten% of our worldwide MAUs. top reseller panel think the share of copy accounts is meaningfully larger in building markets such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as in contrast to much more created markets. In the fourth quarter of 2017, we estimate that untrue accounts may possibly have represented roughly 3-4% of our worldwide MAUs.
Permit that sink in. Fb is admitting that “around” 10% of its month-to-month active customers are fake. Apparently, they never mention what percentage of their everyday lively consumers are phony.

And which is the issue with social media. You will not know what is real and what’s fake any more.

Social media hasn’t been real for a although.

As entrepreneurs and advertisers, we pleasure ourselves on accuracy. In the olden instances of marketing and promoting, we obsessed over ranking numbers of television set shows, readership for print promotions, and delivery success prices for immediate mail.

In all instances, the platforms of the working day have been intensely audited. You knew, with truthful certainty, was the audiences were for any specific medium or channel because there was normally a level of assessment someplace for the quantities.

Classic media such as radio, Television, and print experienced been about long sufficient that there have been 1000’s of circumstance reports a single could review the success or failures of specific campaigns. Due to the fact these mediums have been element of the general public report, it was simple to function backward to see what combine of media and spending budget labored and what didn’t.

As an market, we could rapidly establish benchmarks for success – not just based mostly on our personal experiences- but in the collective encounters of very distinct techniques laid bare for every person to dissect.

Well, that all went out the window with social media.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’s figures had been constantly a joke.

In days of yore, company valuation was primarily based on revenues, assets, and human cash, and overall performance.

That all modified when somebody came up with the notion of “day-to-day energetic customers.”

The race to gain users turned the driving power for social media platforms in a way that we’ve in no way witnessed prior to. Now, the obsession with person development opened the door to advertising and advertising and marketing fraud on a scale that just was not achievable formerly.

Let us get one thing clear: any system that permits for men and women to develop countless numbers of faux profiles so other folks can purchase likes, followers, retweets, or shares is toxic to advertisers and makes alike.

Now, I realize that the word “permits” is doing a whole lot of work in that sentence, so allow me broaden a little bit what I indicate.

I never believe I will get several arguments when I say that -irrespective of what I consider of them- the most successful social media platforms on the world are also some of the most innovative technological enterprises on the planet. They have -arguably- some of the very best AI close to, as their complete organization types revolve close to getting in a position to crunch numbers, facts, and obscure parts of knowledge hundreds of thousands of times a second.

They are also huge businesses, with an army of lawyers and IP bulldogs ready to shield their brand name in opposition to any hostile outside forces.

So make clear to me, how is it, that even after all we have seen in the information men and women can still acquire Facebook likes, or Twitter followers, or Instagram supporters?

The purpose: it was often a rip-off. And we received conned along with everybody else.

If your organization is valued on your number of customers and the action of individuals consumers on your platform, what do you care if they are fake or not? If you did, you would employ an armada of auditors to make certain the integrity of your userbase. I don’t think they ever did and will never do this.