Dirty secrets of social media

When social media first popped up, we all used it to connect with friends and family. Over time, it developed into a place to showcase your talents to a broader community and build an audience.

Money soon followed, and social media became the new Hollywood. Internet personalities are the new rock stars. And like Hollywood and the music industry, everything you see is done for show. It’s branding and paid advertising.

Platforms like Twitter are well known for being flooded with fake followers and bots (it’s not the only one).

Twitter Has a Huge Fake Follower ProblemThis is probably not surprising news to anyone, but nearly half of the followers of high-profile individuals on Twitter are probably fake. In some cases, these followers are aggressive spambot accounts firing off an abnormally high number of tweets each day. In other cases, they are inactive accounts originally created at some time in the past specifically for the purpose of inflating an individual’s follower total. And, in still other cases, they are literally propaganda accounts designed to amplify (or attack) the messages of certain top-level political figures. This should be alarming news for anyone, since it basically means that […]https://socialmediahq.com/twitter-has-a-huge-fake-follower-problem/

Even on brand new niche platforms like Clubhouse, you can buy followers and stage time. There are a lot of sales funnels in social media. If you pay the wrong people, they’ll just take your money and tag you.

Besides the followers and engagement, the pictures are faked, staged, and highly processed. Nerd City on YouTube has some great videos pointing out how highly photoshopped images are from influencers who swear they don’t use photoshop.

And it doesn’t pay as much as you think it would. You aren’t going to hit 6-figure salaries or higher unless you’re in the upper echelon of social media influencers with 7-figure followings.

Even then, it takes a lot of hard work, and most people are teams working with people behind the scenes and in public.

It’s not uncommon for celebrities to have anonymous accounts while their team rings their branded accounts online.

The entire thing is a business, and it is only becoming more prevalent as time goes on. At this point, traditional stage performers (actors, musicians, speakers, comedians, etc) are competing with social media influencers from YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram for venues.

Performers are being judged by their online social media following more than their talent. That’s changing the playing field, especially since the pandemic.

At this point, it’s basically necessary to have a presence online that’s manufactured to fit a brand. That’s why I work with agencies that help creators and brands navigate this new economy and society.

Here are a few social media posts that infamously got people fired, if you want more.

8 Social Media Posts That Got Someone FiredPretty much everybody is on one social media network or another. Regardless of privacy concerns and complaints of stalking, harassment, and photos being stolen and used for marketing or fake profiles, we all love being able to connect with each other. We’re all know aware that what you post on social media can have dire consequences, and people are routinely accosted for opinions or other updates posted online. Personally I use social media mostly to troll as a means of building my online brand and increasing traffic to my web funnel. Not everyone is lucky enough to work for themselves, however. Most people work for someone else, who doesn’t always appreciate what’s being said online. For these eight people, posting on social media led to the loss of a job. Hot broads who smoke weed are hard to find… 1. Teacher Terminated Over Tweets Carly McKinney used to be a high school math teacher at Overland High School in Aurora, CO. That was until the then-23-year-old’s Twitter account got her put on administrative leave in January 2013 and subsequently fired in March 2013. Under the username @Crunk_Bear McKinney’s account was filled with racy NSFW photos of the young woman smoking weed, posing in risque outfits, and generally wilding out. Not only that, but she often discussed male students as jailbait, having drugs in her car in the school parking lot, and other thoughts probably not the best things to be posting when you’re employed by the school district. While McKinney’s posts are simply par for the course on Twitter, once the school district discovered it, she made national headlines. Pretty much everyone in the media branded her with a scarlet letter and sent her on a modern-day walk of atonement that would’ve made even Cersei Lannister grimace. Some students jumped to her defense, arguing she did nothing wrong, but once the media feeding frenzy began, there was no saving McKinney’s teaching career. A web search of Carly McKinney today still shows countless pages of this old news story, showing teachers don’t make enough to afford the type of reputation management services rich people hire to hide their indiscretions. On top of this, both her real name and Crunk Bear username are still brought up as the definitive teacher-on-social-media cautionary tale. One can only wonder what Carly McKinney is up to these days… As hard as she got fucked, we all hope she didn’t… 2. PR Exec Sacked After a Tweet McKinney isn’t the only one who fell victim to Twitter. Justine Sacco was a successful PR executive for InterActive Corp, the owner of popular websites like CollegeHumor.com, Match.com, Dictionary.com, and Vimeo.com. That was until December 2013, when she tweeted the now-infamous tweet about her trip to Africa. By the time her plane landed, Sacco’s tweet had made the rounds on mainstream media and she received a voicemail from her boss letting her know she was fired. Of course being a PR rep for such a popular company, Sacco had more connections in the medihttp://typo.today/8-social-media-posts-that-got-someone-fired/