Being a small business owner, you’re always on the hunt for affordable, time saving services to help grow your brand online. So when I stumbled across a gig on Fiverr promising “highly engaging, viral social media management” for just (around) AUD$180 a month, I thought I’d struck marketing gold. Boy, was I wrong.
How were you wrong Ben?
Well, I’ll tell you Ben (pretending to be another person who is interested in this topic) – Read on!
They lied about the engagement
The ad boasted “guaranteed real engagement” from an experienced social media guru. With what I can expect:
- Provide a tested growth strategy WITH RESULTS
- Attractive Content Design & Strategy
- Optimization and Daily Maintenance of Your all Accounts
- Best Hashtag Research
- Schedule Daily Posts to attract the audience
- Create Brand Awareness
- Build Engagement
- Promoting Your Services/Products through daily posts
- Grow followers likes (organically)
create Stories, reels, TikTok videos, - YouTube shorts
- Target your audience
- Action plan
In reality, the likes and follows flooding my accounts were about as genuine as a dropbear. Every single one of them traced back to accounts based in India with dodgy names like “Mawas Mawa.” I’m no marketing maverick, but I’m pretty sure my hip Richmond business isn’t the core target audience for Sopowa Sopow, Fovofa Fovofa or even Yecar Yecar.
It’s funny how as soon as their generated content stopped, so did all the overseas engagement.
The names of their bots are hilarious
I wasn’t making up those names, Sopowa Sopow and friends are all real (fake) followers I received from their marketing. When I ended it, they tried to explain to me how great the engagement was and how many new followers I had. Zero, the answer to “How many new real followers did I get?” was Zero.
They lied about who they were
According to their Fiverr profile, I was supposedly hiring a female social media whizz with years of experience and a string of glowing reviews, she also knew how to speak Spanish, French, German. Everything looked legit… until I did a little probing and sleuthing and found out that they are actually a group of blokes operating out of a call centre in Bangladesh. They had a false facebook name called John [Redacted] which they said was their husband’s name. He looked like he was living in Rome? They couldn’t even keep consistency with the spelling of their name, from Fiverr, to Whatsapp to Instagram and Facebook, each time their name was slightly different. I thought it would be funny, but I think it might have cost me business.
I just ended up wasting money
At the end of the day, they did post the agreed-upon number of times daily across my Facebook and Instagram accounts. But the content? Wow… it was stunningly terrible. Just these vague, spammy captions packed with irrelevant hashtags (#SeamlessExperience #ConvenientShopping? For my web design business?). Generic stock photos, zero personality, and a brand voice that couldn’t have been further from my own.
It was lazy, soulless work – the complete antithesis of everything I stand for as a business owner. I hate to admit it, but those few dollars I invested in a too-good-to-be-true social media manager were utterly wasted. Either fly solo and put in the hard yards yourself, or please, do yourself a favour and hire a professional social media service you can actually trust. Otherwise, the only thing that goes viral is regret.