How to identify cheating in social networking communities

Some public pages can boast of a lot of activity from their subscribers, who leave comments under their posts. However, these indicators do not always indicate that the community is attracting users with interesting and unique content. There is a possibility that public administrators used the services of special services that create the appearance of activity on pages on social networks. From this article you can learn how to check VK likes for cheating.

How to determine cheating on VKontakte

There are many pages on VKontakte with fake subscribers. Even commercial communities often buy them: some SMMers think that a large number of subscribers will increase trust in the company.

Before checking for cheating, determine the number of blocked participants. These are not necessarily bots - sometimes users are hacked, and the administration of the social network blocks such pages. Look at the page's follower count and then go to the Members tab. The number here is smaller, and the difference between these indicators is the number of blocked participants.

Analyze your community subscribers. For regional communities, select a filter by city. In a community with live members, the majority of members should be from the same city. A large percentage of subscribers from Voronezh in a pizzeria group from Novosibirsk would arouse suspicion.

We filtered the participants by city, the number changed to only 1,300 people. It looks like the subscribers are real.

See what other pages members are subscribed to. Offers are not created separately for each group, so the same accounts turn out to be members of different pages that bought subscribers. To check for bots, use any parser. Even a free tool will do. Section "Similar Communities".

Special service sites for getting likes

Vktarget - a service for boosting likes and subscribers
Some competition fans have long realized that automatic boosting of likes through bots is easily recognized. This deprives you of the desired result and prevents you from being among the winners. Automatic methods have begun to be replaced by semi-automatic ones, in the form of special service sites for boosting indicators.

A striking example of such a web resource is Vktarget, which allows you to get likes not only on VKontakte, but also on other social networks. A person, for a small amount, launches a campaign with targeting, age, number of subscribers, and so on. This suggests that people are more real, and therefore it is more difficult to distinguish cheaters.

Everything would be fine, but the VK administration is on the alert, helping to identify a problematic character. People want to make money on such sites, so they place junk advertising messages on the pages, which causes blocking. It turns out that here too you need to analyze the profile of likes, but not at the end of the competition, but in several time periods.

Thus, the dynamics and number of blocked profiles can be traced, which clearly indicates the use of specialized sites. Logic and observation will help solve the problem. But there is another way where it is much more difficult to determine cheating.

Definition of cheats on Instagram

Before the advent of algorithmic feeds, you could navigate by reach and activity. Now even accounts with live followers can have low reach and ER. By the way, this is why you don’t need to focus on the number of subscribers when buying advertising. Instead, evaluate audience activity and the content of comments.

You can detect cheating using Popsters (the service supports 10 popular social networks). Load the account you are interested in and check if there are any posts with a sharp increase in likes or comments.

Jumps in activity do not always mean boost: perhaps the post was included in the recommendations and therefore received more coverage. Read the comments carefully: are they written by living people? What is their length and content? If you are still in doubt, ask the blogger for statistics specifically for this post to assess the reach. It's much more difficult to screw it up.

Checking reposts and likes

Dead souls in VK
Competitions on social networks are built on the same principle, where it is important for participants to get more likes or reposts. To fulfill the conditions, many ask friends and acquaintances to do the latter, but not all. The most cunning ones begin to use special programs called bots.

The software collects advertising pages or profiles of people participating in the exchange of likes or reposts. The more accounts are included in the system, the higher the number of likes. But there are pitfalls here that make it possible to identify a sly person and deprive him of the opportunity to participate in a promotion or draw.

Approximately 80% of VK profiles that work with this program are blocked by the administration. This is shown by a corresponding picture, which is easily identified among the photographs of real users. It is enough to look at the profile of likes to understand whether a person is honest or not.

It is necessary to evaluate one more item - the names of people in the profile, their avatar and the number of groups. If there is a naked girl in the picture, there are a lot of communities and dubious services are offered, know that this is another bot. A participant may be disqualified from the competition. But this method does not always allow you to identify cheating.

conclusions

Before buying advertising, analyze the community for promotion.
On VKontakte, use a filter by city for regional communities or parse target communities of subscribers.
On Instagram, look for unusual spikes in activity and read comments on posts.
Twitter, use special tools to find fakes.
On Facebook, rate users manually.

Interesting articles continuing the topic:

What a marketer should know about social media scrapers;
A complete guide to VK statistics;
Study of user activity on social networks in 2018;
How to audit an Instagram account, algorithm and nuances of verification.

How to get rid of cheating likes when holding VKontakte competitions.

Published: March 19, 2014

One of the most popular activities on VKontakte is holding various competitions, in particular photo competitions. In fact, this is a very good option for activity, since ideally an interesting photo competition with a valuable prize engages the audience well and has a good viral effect, as a result of which more people learn about your community. However, not everything is so smooth. Very often, problems begin already at the final stage of the competition, when it comes to determining the winners. In fact, VKontakte has two main mechanics for determining the winner of the competition - determining the winner with the help of a competent jury or determining the winner by counting votes from Internet users. At the same time, if you decide that the winner will be determined by the jury, you risk the fact that many potential participants in the competition will begin to be indignant, “they say, this is a dishonest competition, everything has already been known for a long time, the prize will still be given to our own, we won’t participate.” " Therefore, many organizers of VKontakte competitions prefer to focus on the method of determining the winner by counting votes, and the votes (no matter what) are called “likes”. It seems that everything is fair - whose photo gets the most likes wins. Actually, not quite like that. More or less experienced participants in such competitions, and even more so seasoned participants, called “prize-catchers,” know that there are many techniques that allow you to cheat these same ones in a not entirely honest way. This can be done using various automatic services where you can buy or exchange likes. As a last resort, if you have a lot of free time, you can simply write personal messages to familiar and not so familiar people asking them to like your photo. This is good for the participant, but not so good for you as the organizer of the competition. Firstly, your goal when holding a competition is for as many people as possible to know about you and become interested in your community. But if the participant simply bought it, then it will not bring any benefit to you. Secondly, the most unpleasant thing for you in this story is that often participants in such competitions (and especially those who themselves are dishonest) try in every possible way to “help” you identify a competitor who is not playing by the rules. As a result, such, excuse me, crap may arise around your competition that you will only worsen your reputation by holding it.

What is the way out of this situation? After all, photo contests are truly one of the most interesting activities on VKontakte and I wouldn’t want to give up this opportunity.

I think that you can find several ways to get rid of VKontakte cheating, but in this article I want to share one of them that I really liked. This is the VKontakte LikeChecker application that allows you to weed out real ones from suspicious ones (most likely fake ones). Essentially, this application divides the comments under each photo into two categories - marks from members of your community and marks from those who are not subscribers to the community. Using this application, you can immediately stipulate in the rules of the competition that only votes from subscribers of your community will be taken into account when counting votes. In this way, you will prevent competition participants from using various automated services. If a contest participant asks someone to vote for his photo via a personal message, then the voter will also need to join the community in order to vote, and remain in it at least until the votes are counted. Those. This is definitely a profit for you!

The application works quite simply - you insert a link to the competition photo album into a special window, click “Recalculate”, and, as a result, you receive photos from the album, under each of which is written the number of likes from community members (in green), and the number of likes from people, not subscribed to your community (in red).

This way, you can calculate the markup and summarize the voting results in your competition in the most honest way. Well, I hope that this method will help you in holding VKontakte competitions. If you know any other effective methods for weeding out cheaters, share them in the comments to this post.

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Is it possible to fight the increase in likes?

Of all the methods of cheating during voting, they try to track only commercial likes. Just a few years ago, such tracking was very effective, since bots and fake accounts were used to cheat votes. Nowadays, votes are most often bought from real people, so identifying such manipulations is much more difficult, especially if tens of thousands of people managed to participate in the survey.

In general, in every major vote, the organizers disqualify participants who have distinguished themselves by particularly clumsy cheating. Those who use this tool more skillfully, or people with great “friendly” support, continue to participate. Moreover, as a rule, the more people voted in a poll, the more distorted its results will be.

Without distorting the results, you can conduct surveys in closed groups with a small number of participants. But this makes it possible to obtain a cross-section of the opinions of only a narrow, isolated group of people, which again makes the result unreliable for most tasks.

How do they get likes on VKontakte?

The demand for changing voting results in one’s favor by artificially increasing likes has existed for as long as the VKontakte polling mechanism itself. Some of the cheating methods are so common and familiar that their use has become not only standard in all large-scale voting, but is encouraged by their organizers.

There are three main ways to get likes. Usually only one of them is used, but during principle voting, participants and interested parties can use several at once.

Method one: classic

This method is most often used during competitions, especially if prizes are awarded for first place. You've definitely encountered it: remember how often your friends ask you to support them with a like in order to win the vote. Then you pass this request on to your friends, and they pass it on to theirs. As a result, a whole network of people is formed who vote for the contestant not because he is better, but because he is a “friend of a friend.” That is, in essence, such requests are nothing more than a classic way of cheating.

And although large voting, regardless of the topic, has long turned into a competition “who has more friends,” the organizers do not prevent this, since this approach increases audience reach and organic traffic. Obviously, such an absolutely safe increase in VKontakte likes greatly influences the outcome of voting. Accordingly, it makes no sense to trust their results. In such conditions, even outstanding works will end up in last place without an appropriate support group or an incredibly lucky combination of circumstances.

Method two: labor intensive

This method is a variant of the previous one. It is used for both competitions and thematic surveys. For example, it is often used to ensure that one's brand of car or favorite football team wins a poll. In this case, the request to vote is posted on forums and groups, attracting many people to participate in the survey.

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The method is quite labor-intensive, since to effectively and quickly gain likes you need to:

manually post posts asking for help in voting on a large number of resources;
conduct discussions and respond to objections from participants;
Constantly support topics while voting is ongoing.

With due diligence, thousands and tens of thousands of people can be recruited to distort the real picture of voting.

Method three: commercial

The easiest way to get likes on VKontakte. In this case, there is no need to persuade friends and send hundreds of messages asking for help. The required number of likes is simply bought on specialized resources, and due to the development of technology and the complication of algorithms, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to track such promotion.

Due to the extremely low cost of likes—in some cases, about a dollar per hundred—the commercial method is widely used to boost any votes. In fact, this leaves no chance of getting a reliable result.