Many of us are familiar with bots in the context of customer support. Bots are often used by companies to answer generic customer questions and to direct complaints to the appropriate human handlers. The traditional use of chatbots in a service-oriented landscape doesn’t seem to trouble too many people, but what many don’t know is that there is a new generation of bots on the rise. This new generation of bots are referred to as social bots, and they are starting to raise a lot of concerns.
Social bots are bots that are often deployed to popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The main objective of social bots is to blend in with real human users. Social bots are programmed and implemented in a way that makes them seem as real people. These bots are crafted very elegantly and the information in their profiles seem very plausible.
Powered by data mining and deep learning, social bots begin to adapt to the social media culture very effectively. Social bots can be assigned a list of topics and they will quickly begin to interact with people in that niche. The big difference between regular bots and social bots is that social bots don’t spam content; instead they start to learn from real users and begin to mimic them. Furthermore, social bots use the data available to them to alter their behaviors based on the current trends. Therefore, it is very unlikely for the average user to distinguish social bots from authentic users.
Taking this into account, social bots can be seen as the quintessential marketing asset because they can be used to influence a customer’s purchasing decision. More often or not, word of mouth referrals are very powerful in terms of conversion rates and since social bots mimic the actions of human users they are a great tool for word of mouth marketing. For example, a social bot on twitter can follow people, and interact with them. Some common actions of this social bot would be retweeting other people’s tweets, messaging other users, and commenting on various tweets.
Over time, the social bot will begin to create social proof and start to curate its own list of followers. Then this social bot can be used as a medium to introduce new products to people in that niche. People will generally buy products recommended by these social bots because they have been interacting with these bots for a long time and they start to trust it. However, what they don’t know is that these users they trust are actually computer programs. Marketers have already started to implement these social bots on various social media platforms in order to drive more sales. Social bots are cheaper alternatives compared to paid advertising and they are definitely more effective because people presume them to be real. Due to these factors, more and more marketers are turning to social bots to boost sales.
Manoj Kumar is a tech/startup enthusiast. His areas of current research include IoT, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence. He is very excited to see how technology will transform the future. Twitter: @manoj_kumar_99