TikTok bots can be a mess when they engage with your account. If they are ruining your engagements and causing you headaches. You’ll need to get rid of them. Read the article below to know how to get that done.
Videos have emerged as one of the key mediums in our current digital spaces for communicating our ideas, opinions, and even marketing strategies to our viewers. TikTok, one of the most well-known Chinese-based video sharing platform, is among the most used today. TikTok is a well-known app among youth and adults, as we all know.
Basically, it lets you make and share videos that last between 15 and 60 seconds. While we were all in our houses during the pandemic in quarantine, TikTok was a chance for people to have fun and make hilarious videos. However, it has since expanded beyond that.
But given the dramatic rise in TikTok’s popularity, it comes as absolutely no surprise that scammers have made it their home base. TikTok fake accounts are popping up in large numbers, and many of them are impersonating businesses. Perhaps TikTok isn’t policing fake activity as well as it should. This significantly impacts the user experience, content makers, and those who advertise there. However, in 2022, the company removed over 51 million fake accounts with either bots or scammers running them.
So, checking your TikTok account for bot activity and fake followers is essential. It is a fundamental component of a successful marketing strategy on the platform. As such, find out how to get rid of these bots on TikTok in this blog post for some practical steps.
What is a TikTok Bot?
The concept of TikTok bots can be seen in a number of different ways. The best way to think of a TikTok bot is as a marketing tool that you can use to manage your account(s) or automate certain actions that you would regularly perform on TikTok. A target account may be automatically liked, disliked, followed, or unfollowed as part of these.
These bots have the power to quickly and easily gain you thousands of followers. This kind of action tries to increase engagement and your following organically. Additionally, TikTok bots function according to the same principles as conventional Instagram bots. The seobotsite tiktok bot is one of the most well-known ones.
As interesting and beneficial as these TikTok bots may be, they could be sort of spammy sometimes, depending on whether you know how to use them correctly and in a safe way. As a result, the actions of these bots could negatively affect the performance of your account.
How Do TikTok Bots Work?
The principles that guide the working processes of TikTok bots are the same as those of a traditional Instagram bot. When you give the tool target audience guidelines and custom filters, it uses this information to automate the activity of liking, commenting, and following other accounts' posts and profiles at scale. These likes, comments, and follows generate hundreds of additional opportunities for people to come across your username, go to your account, and follow it. The more effective your targets and guidelines, the more traffic you will be driving. This would ultimately translate the high percentage of traffic into more followers and more popularity on the platform.
Effect of TikTok bots on Your Account
Considering how TikTok bots work, it should be obvious how detrimental fake followers generated through bot accounts can be to a business' TikTok profile. As such, one of the main motivations for these fake accounts is the urge of many brands for more followers, which motivates them to purchase followers. Over time, many of the followers they buy turn out to be fake. Hence, some of the repercussions of bots on your TikTok account include the following:
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Not being able to reach your target audience
On TikTok, user interactions are compared to determine which types of videos people enjoy or share, as well as which accounts they follow and which comments or other content they provide. This data is used to power recommendations. As a result, TikTok's decision to promote your videos depends in part on the types of viewers who like, share, and comment on the TikTok videos created by your business.
You probably won't reach the audience you desire if all of your followers are bot accounts from TikTok fraud schemes. Hence, if you're marketing to a community of bots, it's going to be impossible to successfully promote your business.
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Ruin your brand's reputation
While using a TikTok bot can make it seem like you have a large following, once your real audience realizes that your follower base is artificial, it could damage the reputation of your business. Chances are that some of your real followers will cease following you indefinitely, even if you stop deploying bots or remove these bot accounts. A reduction in conversion and engagement rates may eventually result from it. My point is this: if you have fake followers who don't interact with your postings, you can miss the chance to encourage engagement from actual followers.
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Ad budget squandering
Smaller businesses and influencers who want to grow quickly engage in unethical behaviour. With the pressure on influencers to have high levels of engagement, it’s obvious that they too use bots to inflate the numbers. This is a way of fraudulently siphoning off a company’s resources. So, as a brand that pays someone who seems to have a large following money for engagement, what you’re getting in return isn’t often what you think.
When you reduce the number of bot accounts on your company's platform, your marketing team will be able to shift their focus from numbers to metrics from real customers for your company's engagement rate and authenticity.
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Using TikTok bots leaves you vulnerable to fraudulent attacks
As stated earlier, TikTok has a poor approach to policing content that is fake, fraudulent, or misleading. Because of this poor regulation, many scammers pretend to be popular TikTokers, drive users to adult dating websites, or even advertise bots that increase likes and followers. Perhaps TikTok thinks they are doing enough, but this strategy is actually what is encouraging this fake activity.
How to Spot TikTok Bots
We've seen that, despite their appearance on paper, false followers and bot accounts can actually do more harm than good. Therefore, locating and eliminating bots just makes sense. Unfortunately, unlike more traditional social media platforms like Instagram, where it's much easier to see these red flags, TikTok makes it exceedingly difficult for users to spot them. So, in order to assist your company in identifying bots and fake followers on TikTok, here are some common red flags.
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No original content
On TikTok, it's usual to share other users' videos, although the majority of reliable accounts also upload at least some original content. Besides, sharing short videos is TikTok's main purpose. Almost every user shares some, notwithstanding the relatively low quality. So, if you find a follower who hasn't uploaded any videos of their own, this can be a sign that the account isn't real and the TikTok bot is at work.
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An account with strange numbers
Genuine accounts, when it comes to follower counts, people that follow them, and engagement levels, also exhibit similar tendencies. For instance, when people initially sign up for TikTok, some new users can begin following a huge number of accounts, which distorts the ratio of followers to followings. Even though every user manages their accounts differently, utilizing the statistics, you can still quickly identify bots. To be sure, it would be wise to look at the number of followers you believe to be bots or fakes; after all, statistics don't lie.
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Short and strange Bursts of Activity
When you notice an occasional, short-spiking trend of activity on a follower account, it is very possible a bot is doing that. Sometimes they follow thousands of people at the beginning and then leave the account alone. They may even share a few videos on the account creation day before stopping sharing fresh content. Once you notice pockets of activity in an account that are not consistent, something is wrong.
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An account with empty bio
Typically, a TikTok bio only has 80 characters to convey your message. Some people's profiles are understandable, while others communicate in gibberish. On the other hand, you may know an account is a fake one created by a bot when the bio is completely blank. Also, especially on a platform with such a strong visual component as TikTok, you should take the absence of a profile image as a warning sign.
How to Get Rid of TikTok Bots
In the end, assuming your company didn't actively pay for the engagement on TikTok, it can be challenging to identify fraudulent accounts. Besides, many obvious red flags are more difficult to spot using this app because of its design. However, it still makes sense for companies or digital agencies that use TikTok for their digital marketing campaigns to prevent these destructive TikTok bots from ruining their marketing efforts. Here are a few techniques for doing that:
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Run Audit on your followers
Conducting an audit is one way to stop TikTok bots from harming your ad campaigns on the TikTok platform. If you manage a TikTok account for your company, you should do frequent audits to make sure you are managing it as efficiently as possible. You can determine whether your company objectives are being met by doing a TikTok audit.
Examining the caliber of your followers to ascertain whether they are valuable to you—real or fake—is another crucial component of your TikTok audit. Although TikTok's app does not presently provide a native follower auditing feature, you can check for bot accounts using third-party applications. One of them is HypeAuditor.
- Learn more,
14 Free Fake Follower Checker & Audit Tools
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Manually remove fake and inactive followers
After you have completed your audit, deleting fraudulent and inactive accounts is another effective technique to stop these TikTok bots. Your engagement increases, which is one of the main advantages of deleting these inactive followers that have been generated by bots.
When your engagement increases, the individuals that matter actually see your content. With greater involvement, influencers can negotiate better brand deals, and businesses can attract more targeted clients.
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Use ad fraud solution
To be frank, manually removing these bot accounts would be really time-consuming and exhaustive. As such, another effective approach to stopping TikTok bots from negatively affecting your TikTok account is to leverage an ad fraud solution with real-time detection and social media integrations to check your traffic as it comes in, detect bots, and hide your ads from fraudsters. There are a lot of decently priced fraud solutions out there to look at.
FAQs
Q. Are TikTok Bots Legal and Safe?
It is safe to assume that TikTok bots are mainly lawful because the majority of their activity on the platform are geared toward boosting impressions and engagements. However, some scammers have used these bots to perpetrate cybercrimes as a result of the platform's lax monitoring procedures.
You have no issues with these bots if all you want to do is share videos and get likes and comments. These bots do, however, have some seriously detrimental effects for businesses, particularly for those brands looking to run advertising campaigns on the network.
Q. What do TikTok Bots Do?
In basic terms, TikTok bots are used to automate common tasks on the platform, such as liking, commenting on, and following the postings of other accounts. Similar to bots on other social media platforms, TikTok bots function similarly. You only need to provide the TikTok bots' target audience with guidelines and certain filters, and it will handle the rest.
Q. Are Fake Followers TikTok Bots?
The majority of fake accounts that gain followers are bot-generated accounts. These are mostly owned by scammers or click farms looking to deceive companies into paying for followers. One way to tell if these fake followers are bots is when they unfollow an ad after following it for a few days in order to mimic human behaviour. Some may remain as followers but are inactive.
Conclusion
For the time being, it appears like TikTok is suffering greatly from a combination of quick success and poor regulation, and marketers are the ones who are suffering the most. TikTok traffic is mostly made up of bots; therefore, if the proper security measures aren't put in place, your ads will just be funding these bots' increased visibility.
This is why it is important to stop them before they begin to negatively impact your ad campaigns. We hope that this article has pointed you in the right direction in order to tackle the effect of TikTok bots on your account.
