Bots Facebook

[Renita Lukins]

Thestaggering figure of more than three billion fake accounts blocked by Facebook over a six-month period highlights the challenges faced by social networks in curbing automated accounts, or bots, and other nefarious efforts to manipulate the platforms.

Facebook said its artificial intelligence detects most of these efforts and disables the accounts before they can post on the platform. Still, it acknowledges that around five percent of the more than two billion active Facebook accounts are probably fake.

Bots played a disproportionate role in spreading misinformation on social media ahead of the 2016 US election, according to researchers. Malicious actors have been using these kinds of fake accounts to sow distrust and social division in many parts of the world, in some cases fomenting violence against groups or individuals.

"These systems use a combination of signals such as patterns of using suspicious email addresses, suspicious actions, or other signals previously associated with other fake accounts we've removed," said Facebook analytics vice president Alex Schultz in a blog post.

The figures from Facebook's transparency report suggests Facebook is acting aggressively on fake accounts, said Onur Varol, a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University.

Many users can't tell the difference between a real and fake account, researchers say. Facebook and Twitter have been stepping up efforts to identify and weed out bogus accounts, and some public tools like Botometer developed by Varol and other researchers can help determine the likelihood of fake Twitter accounts and followers.

"A lot of the harmful content we see, including misinformation, are in fact commercially motivated," Zuckerberg told reporters. "So one of the best tactics is removing incentives to create fake accounts upstream, which limits content made downstream."

Having an army of realistic fake profiles at your fingertips gifts the owner a great deal of power. As social media thrives on herd mentality, the ability to artificially inflate the perceived support for a cause or topic has a dramatic impact on the world and can be auctioned off for a hefty price.

The same trend can be seen in the way Facebook reports on removing bots. On the one hand, the huge number of fake accounts which Facebook is regularly removing could suggest that they are on top of the situation.

Furthermore, we protect your ads from being seen by bots and other nefarious traffic sources, provide you with full transparency into every click, and even use cross-platform data to inform your other campaigns.

In the days following the announcement, the tech and marketing space lost its mind. Thousands of articles were penned about the news, each one speculating on what an open Messenger platform could mean for businesses' customer service teams.

Why all the ardor? For starters, Facebook Messenger already has about 1.3 billion monthly active users worldwide. Not registrants. Not people who got forced to download it when Facebook spun it out of the standard Facebook app. We're talking about active users who have adopted Messenger as a primary communication channel.

Anytime a company as forward-looking as Facebook opens up a platform as heavily adopted as Messenger it should raise eyebrows. So the early excitement, well, it's justified. But what comes next is entirely undefined. And as marketers, we have an exciting opportunity to help shape it.

"Bot" is a generalized term used to describe any software that automates a task. Chatbots, which anyone can now build into Facebook Messenger, automate conversation -- at least the beginning stages of it.

What's special about the bots you can build on Facebook Messenger is that they're created using Facebook's Wit.ai Bot Engine, which can turn natural language into structured data. You can read more on this here, but in short, this means that not only can bots parse and understand conversational language, but they can also learn from it. In other words, your bot could get "smarter" with each interaction.

You've undoubtedly heard of artificial intelligence (AI). And this is a type of AI. Natural language interface is common in most chatbots, but by opening up the Messenger Platform and providing developer tools like the bot engine, Facebook has made building an intelligent bot easier.

Users are able to search for companies and bots inside Facebook Messenger by name, so you'll probably get some users that way. But, as with any new pathway into your company, you're likely to find that adoption of this communication channel within your customer base won't happen without some promotion. Facebook is trying to make that easier for businesses and organizations as well.

If you have phone numbers for customers and pre-existing permission to reach out to them, you can find them on Facebook Messenger via customer matching. Conversations initiated through customer matching will include a final opt-in upon the first Facebook Messenger communication.

Messenger codes are unique images that serve as a visual thumbprint for your business and bot on Messenger. If you are familiar with Snapchat codes, these visual cues act in the same way, redirecting anyone who scans them using Messenger to the corresponding company page or bot.

The example Mark Zuckerberg lauded in his keynote was the ability to send flowers from 1-800-Flowers without actually having to call the 1-800 number. A user, Danny Sullivan, subsequently tried it by sending flowers to Zuckerberg himself and documented the five-minute process here.

Facebook is releasing its own bot for Messenger, a personal assistant bot named "M." M can answer a wide range of requests -- from restaurant recommendations, to complex trivia, to last-minute hotel rates in the city.

Healthtap is an interactive healthcare provider that connects users to advice from medical professionals. On the heels of the platform announcement, Healthtap created a bot that enables users to type a medical question into Facebook Messenger and receive a free response from a doctor or browse articles of similar questions.

You can see here how the conversational interface works. The user in this example is inquiring in natural language about a specific health concern. From the user's standpoint, this is similar to texting a friend.

Ah, see that's not the sort of question I can answer for you. Building a bot for Facebook Messenger, like any marketing or product endeavor, is going to take resources -- mainly staff time and expertise -- and may not result in the outcomes you'd like to see.

One of the biggest reasons so many companies went astray in building mobile apps for their businesses is that they saw it as just another version of their website. They didn't take the time to study how being on a mobile device would change the types of interactions their customers would want to have with their company.

Some tasks are just not well-suited for mobile. As a result, many apps sit unused. When you're thinking about a use case for Facebook Messenger, make sure you're thinking about it from the standpoint of the customer or user, not from the company's standpoint.

Perhaps you're having trouble moving leads from one part of your buyer's journey to another, and need a way to nurture their interest after they first discover your website or content and return to learn more.

Traditionally speaking, a knowledge base is a section of your website that organizes all the resources and information a customer would need to properly learn and solve problems related to your product. And sometimes, these knowledge bases can be cumbersome or hard to search through. A Facebook Messenger Bot is one way to better educate customers who have questions about your product.

If your customer service team has more incoming requests than they can handle, it might be because they're only taking them through the phone. Live chat bots can open more request lines, lower call volume, and allow service and support representatives to balance more questions at a time.

If your customer service employees need a better way to share questions with one another as they field them, the right Facebook Messenger bot can loop in more employees more quickly to solve problems.

This question is often too quickly dismissed by companies that see Facebook as a purely social platform, rather than one for businesses. Even if your audience doesn't currently use Facebook for business needs, you need to start by determining whether or not the potential for Facebook marketing is there.

If you have an audience who uses Facebook heavily in their personal lives, they're likely to adopt Messenger as a communications tool. And how they use Messenger may expand beyond how they use Facebook. Today, usage of messaging apps has actually outpaced that of social networks. And as new use cases arise, behavior evolves with them.

Don't open a communication channel with your prospective and existing customers if you can't support it. Even with the automation of a bot, you'll still need to carve out time to do three important things:

If you've thought through the above three questions and think you've got a good foundation for a Facebook Messenger bot then dive in. There's a benefit to being an early adopter in this space. And as a newly open platform, Facebook Messenger needs thoughtful and strategic companies to shape it.

Set up in November 2012, the fake account had amassed almost a million followers by November 2018, when it was finally suspended by Twitter for impersonating the Russian leader. Confusingly, Putin's official, verified English-language Twitter feed has a similar number of followers.

The precise number of fake Twitter accounts is unknown. According to one Twitter staffer, however, each week the platform challenges between 8,5 and 10 million bots, with two-thirds of malicious accounts automatically removed. Facebook estimates that 5% of its worldwide monthly users are fakes. The social network deleted some 1.7 billion fraudulent accounts in the second quarter of 2021 alone.

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