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Inauthentic content is out: Meta and LinkedIn are cracking down. Also, new, exclusive features have hit X. Here’s what you need to know.
Inauthentic Content is Over
From content and interactions created by software (“bots”) to artificially inflating impressions, inauthentic content is not the way to go. Social platforms are increasing the moderation of inauthentic activity and improving their algorithms to better detect it. Here are some types of inauthentic content and the issues they cause.
Bots
Bots create fake impressions for your brand on social media platforms and ads. While brands can buy bots to interact with their posts, other types of bots will independently interact with brands’ posts as well. How to tell: check the comments section for generic or irrelevant comments. Check commenters’ profile pages and ensure that they appear to be real humans with real interactions.
Engagement pods
Engagement pods are massive groups of LinkedIn users that promise reciprocity with interactions on one another’s posts. Rather than receiving organic comments from coworkers, friends, your aunt, and people in your community, you would be receiving manufactured engagement from people you know nothing about. This is not only an unfair advantage, but it’s also disingenuous.
Engagement pods hurt your brand’s reach in the long run, taking away from organic activity your brand could otherwise receive. Even worse, this activity is banned on some platforms. Engagement pods were once encouraged as an easy way to grow on LinkedIn. Now, LinkedIn has had enough. Engagement pods may seem like an easy way to increase impressions, but it becomes harder to grow your circle on LinkedIn when your existing circle isn’t real.
AI in Content Formulation
AI can be helpful to writing, but it shouldn’t be doing the heavy lifting. Using AI to automate content scheduling can save significant time. Using AI to outline ideas and clean up grammar and tone is a great way to use AI responsibly when drafting social posts. However, the human voice is still needed to keep it real. AI is best used to help your work while maintaining a human touch.
At the end of the day, make sure you are posting authentically, without artificially inflating posts or harming your reach.
Meta Takes on Inauthentic Content
Meta is cracking down on unoriginal, inauthentic content. From impersonators to spammy content, Meta has been taking notes on users’ complaints. Content creators are tired of being impersonated and having their content stolen without transformation (read: plagiarized). On the other hand, Facebook users are tired of low-quality, spammy content. Meta wants to reduce both issues as much as possible. Meta has implemented tools to report content copycats.
To Meta, original content is content posted directly by a creator on one of its platforms. In some cases, content can be original if it is transformative of other content: for example, if a video from another creator is then edited to include an opinion from the poster. Unoriginal content, on the other hand, is content that is not transformed or has very small edits to the original and is not considered original content. Meta is also concerned about impersonation and has added new tools to report impersonators. Keep your content original and watch out for copycats on Meta.
LinkedIn Zeroes in on Authenticity
What exactly does LinkedIn consider to be authentic, and why is it cracking down on inauthentic posts and comments?
LinkedIn is joining the fight against inauthentic, manufactured content on its platform. The platform is expanding verification, and the algorithm is filtering out artificial engagement and fake job postings. Engagement pods are also easily detected by LinkedIn’s algorithm, which has improved and is better able to detect coordinated engagement patterns and inauthentic behavior. LinkedIn’s updated algorithm will not tolerate this. LinkedIn is incentivizing human-written posts and cracking down on negative activities.
To succeed on LinkedIn, be genuine, talk about what you know, connect with people you know, and build real relationships. There’s no point to artificially inflating your numbers: it defeats the purpose of the channel.
Subscribers and Stats
New features on X? You got it! X is putting the ball in subscribers’ court, now offering paywalled threads and subscriber-only threads highlights. X also released demographic statistics about how women and different generations tend to use X.
With exclusive threads, X is now allowing users to put individual posts behind a paywall. These posts will then appear in-stream, but will be locked for users who do not subscribe to your content. This new function is intended to increase subscription sign-ups. X has also added subscriber-only highlights. This function was previously hidden in the Subscriptions tab but will now appear in the main feed.
On National Women’s Day, X has also released updated data about the women who use the app. The top categories for women on X are Pop Culture & Leisure, Music, Television, Beauty/Cosmetics, and Fashion. X also shared generational data, showing that over half of the app’s users are millennials.
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Strategic Elements is a full-service public affairs, marketing, and media consulting firm based in Iowa. Our team of political operatives, marketing experts, and media strategists helps businesses, organizations, and causes shape public opinion, influence policy, and drive meaningful change.
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