Marketing and advertising via blogs and social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram and whatnot is pretty much a norm these days, and those who knows the trick of the trade are commonly aware that it is the most effective and cost-saving way to reach targeted audiences and get results almost instantly.

Most brands and PR agency tends to engage social media influencers whose social media platforms have high following numbers, thinking that engaging them will bring alot of revenue and of course, will look rather lovely on the report presentations.

Ironically, not all social media influencers have genuine followers and more often than not, PR agencies that manages advertising campaigns are cheated into engaging ‘influencers’ with fake followers. Yes, people. In case you are not aware (or choose to keep a blind eye to this), followers can be bought. Sometimes, social media influencers ‘invested’ in buying already established fanpages/ social media accounts like IG and Twitter and renamed these accounts later as their own. Some will buy fake followers for their existing accounts to boost up the numbers of their followers on social media accounts. Why do these ‘influencers’ do such unscrupulous thing?

Why, elementary my dear readers. They do this not because they merely wanted to give the world the impression that there are famous, but mainly because ignorant PR agencies and brands are constantly associating the number of followers with fame and therefore will engage these influencers to represent their brands or campaigns.

This got to stop. First it is hurting the social media industry in whole where genuine influencers who can actually reach out to targeted audiences but refused to jump into the bandwagon and buy followers be undermined. Second, it is hurting the brands they are representing and brands are actually paying them for nothing. Third, real influencers will be labeled the same as the fakes, which is really unfair.

Brutal truth that many tend to close their eyes to is that these cheaters in influencers clothing wants nothing more than to score paid postings, invites to events, sponsorships, free travel, product reviews and all sorts of benefit that they could milk out of those brands. And I’ll have you know that plenty started blogging and stuff strictly for the sake of freeloading. Engaging these type of influencers is probably still justifiable if their contents are good but to be honest, most are not and can barely construct proper setences and some are even worst; they plagiarized the contents from others sites.

Now, in all honesty, engaging porn stars for advertising purposes is even better and might give you more worth for your money. At least their followers are genuine as they don’t have a need to buy followers or fans in comparison to some of these self-proclaimed influencers.

So, how to detect influencers with fake followers? Well, there are plenty of ways, but so far the easiest way to study an influencer’s engagements and whatnot and detect fake followers is via SocialBlade. And if you do a lil bit homework or Google it, you’ll realized that there are plenty of sites out there offers fake followers tracking service. You might want to look it up before engaging any influencers and protect your brand and interest.

The whole write up may sound harsh but seriously, what is the point of engaging ‘influencers’ with hundred thousands of followers but the end of the day their engagement are not organic and does not reflect the number of followers and comments that are left are generic comments that are generated from bots? Isn’t that just a waste of time, effort and money?

It is pretty much common for bloggers to join plenty of groups on social media platforms, especially Facebook so that they can not only be in touch with one another without adding each other in their personal account’s friendlist, but so that they could share their thoughts and opinions as well. This is of course, a very healthy thing as community based groups usually encourage healthy discussion as well as encouraging traffic drive through various activities organized by admins/members of the groups. These blogging community groups encourage plenty of positive activities that can help bloggers gained more connections as well as followers too if done right. Some groups even allow advertisers to join in as members and headhunt bloggers for paid campaigns.

But if there’s one thing that is not exactly benefiting bloggers is the habit of sharing (ping-ing) blog links in all of the groups that they joined at the same time. Let’s say Blogger A is a member of 30 or more Blogging Groups on Facebook, and Blogger A decided that each time he/she published a new blog post, he/she would share this particular link leading to the newly published blog post in all of the groups at once.

Sure, Blogger A would justify the act of ping-ing the blog post as an effort to increase the post’s visibility on social media and people would click on the link and read whatever that has been posted, but many do not realized that by doing this, they are succeptible to spam report by other members of the groups/people who are in their friendlist. The popping up of notification alerts can seriously be annoying to some social media users, and not many would be tolerant about it. Usually, these links would be flagged as spam for Facebook to review.

And not only that, those who shares too many of the same links in groups can also be detected by Facebook as spam automatically, leading Facebook to ban them not only from commenting in groups, but the blog domain itself will be permanently marked as dangerous link and you will never be able to share the blog’s link again soon after and it does not matter if you try to mask it by using url shorterner, it will still remained the same. And no, you won’t be able to share it via Facebook Messenger too once Facebook marked your links as spam.

Personally, I only share the links to my blogposts on my own personal Facebook wall and my Fanpage. And of course, occasionally to 2-3 groups at once when I am required to do so by paid campaigns that I participated in, but other than that, I avoid spamming links in groups as once penalized by Facebook, there’s no way you can undo the damage and it would be too late to be regretful then. I limit it to just a maximum of 3 shares per day if I need to post in groups. Other than that, it would be too much and too risky.

Sharing a dozen of your links at once to boost traffic? Well, think again. If you still want to share too many links at once even after reading this, well, be my guest. Share at your own risk. It may be true that sharing that way can help you boost traffic many years ago. But now Facebook is so strict, and this is not really applicable anymore. The only way to promote your blog and increase it’s visibility without risking penalty is just by using the fanpage function on Facebook and boost the posts by buying sponsored fb ad.

Would you believe me if I say that nothing on social media belongs to you? Now, you probably thinks that whatever you uploaded online belongs to you, but all the pictures you uploaded, all the videos and music you created and shared and all the status that you wrote on social media platforms, be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even WeChat does not really belong to you. Even the blog posts that you wrote on your blogs in Blogspot.com or WordPress.org does not belong to you. (This of course is not true if you bought your own domain and self-hosted your blog, but let’s just talk about self-hosted blogs another day)

Dear readers, the truth is you are merely borrowing the ‘community space’ and are just content creators to these social media platforms. Believe it or not, you are actually enriching the actual organizations that owned these social media platforms. You are contributing to their profits and skyrocketing shares. But sad to say, you don’t actually own the accounts and they can be gone in seconds should you violated the terms and conditions of these social media platforms. What terms and conditions you ask me? Well, you know, the long winded thingie that you are forced to read upon sign ups of the account but usually you just gave it a tick and sign up anyway without reading? Yes. THAT terms and conditions. Facebook does not create any contents. Instagram does not produce any pictures. Okay, I think you got what I’m trying to get across by now.

It is always important to have backups somewhere, just in case or account termination or even server crashes. Wouldn’t it be a shame if all your beautiful memories and creative creation goes poof should there be any technical mishaps?

There are many ways for you to backup your pictures and whatnot be it locally on your own hard disks or some cloud storage services that you can sign up out there, so be sure to backup your stuff regularly to avoid data and memory loss. I’m the old school kind of person and therefore, most of my backups are powered by harddisks.

On another note, please be careful whenever you share your personal details on any social media online, as there’s no such thing as absolute privacy as long as you share your info on the internet. That said, it’s time for me to pen down. Til next time, folks.

The blogging industry in Malaysia is rotten. Does my statement irked you bloggers out there? Well, it should, because this post is not meant to be the sweet-idol worshipping kind of thing and when I wrote this, I am more than prepared to once again be the Malaysian bloggers public enemy.

So, you must be wondering what triggered this sudden change where I suddenly stir up some harsh tone in my writing? Well, if you think that this is sudden, perhaps you don’t know me very well and merely knew me for just a a year or two. I’ve been blogging for more than 14 years by now, give and take and I certainly did not start off as a food loving foodie or a selfie loving shallow girl who cares nothing more on how she looks like on her instagram post like I portray myself to be these days. Those who have known me for more than ten years would probably be unfazed with this.

All right, enough rambling, so what triggered this? Well, to be honest, I am writing this because I DON’T like the image bloggers are portraying these days and hence, I’m being stereotyped the same.

1. Plagiarism is common and mushrooming. During the 2002 circa when blogging is almost unheard of, especially in Malaysia, every single blog contents that I know are very personalized and unique. Blog owners actually make an effort to create high quality contents instead of just plagiarizing articles here and there and claiming it as theirs. Plenty of “bloggers”, especially those who are new ones have no respect whatsoever towards intelectual property to the point they’d even steal pictures and crop off watermarks from the rightful owners. How is that justifiable and ethical? I certainly do not condone such thing and honestly, if I were to see that on any blogspot blogs, articles and pictures being used without the owner’s permission, I’d report it to Google and have the entire blog removed, I kid you not. Of course, there’s nothing I can do about self hosted blogs, though.

2. Blogging became nothing more than just an outlet to freeload for stuff. Especially true for new bloggers, I must say. Back then, most blog owners/writers started blogging not because of the benefit they could reap, but they do it because they are passionate about writing and and sharing their personal thoughts to inspire their readers. Back then, blogs are honest and pretty much trustworthy. These days, whenever I ask why people want to start blogging, their answers are mostly the same; hey, everyone seems to be doing it, it’s fun, you get invited to events, get free goodies, get to eat for free, you get your clothes and makeup sponsored, travel for free etc. I don’t aknowledge these people as bloggers. I call these people the trash of the blogging industry, especially when they ended up producing ridiculously low quality contents which are mostly copy&paste items. Everyone wants to be a blogger these days. But they do not realized that there’s more to blogging than earning benefits from it.

3. Bloggers these days acts as if they are entitled for everything. I’ve seen plenty would threw a fit shamelessly or bitch in some whatsapps group etc when they are not invited for certain events or not being sponsored for trips. Now, understand this. Most brands engage bloggers not because they are glamourous, but they want the possible revenue that certain bloggers could possibly generate in a win-win agreement. If brands/establishments think that you can’t deliver or is not suited to represent them, then I think bloggers should accept it as a business decision instead of making a huge fuss about it and badmouth those who are selected. Gone are the days where bloggers are pretty respected for their ethical behaviour and credibility. Such a shame.

4. Most Malaysian blog these days are full of nothing but just product reviews although the blog owners claimed that the blog is niche, eg: lifestyle, parenting or beauty/health. Sure, there’s nothing wrong in reviewing products, especially if it is an honest review, but making the blog looks like some online catalogue with just descriptions of products? And what’s worst is that some accept just about any product to review regardless of their niche. Sorry, I don’t really sit well with that because blogs are not supposed to look like an online catalogue, and a crappy one at that.

5. Attending events/food reviews and not writing about it. There are plenty of “bloggers” who does this. Some are even under my recommendations. I feel this is disgusting but I won’t elaborate, the less tempted I am to list out the names. Yes. I do hold grudge as it is an embarassment for me to introduce someone to brand managers and yet they do not deliver.

6. It is the era of Malaysian Blogging Gangsterism. Bloggers who are mostly lone rangers and prefer to work on their own are badmouthed and suppressed the opportunities to events/paid reviews. I can elaborate more but suffice to say that if certain bloggers don’t belong to certain groups/organization/clubs, they’d be shunned. And this is especially true to those who are very outspoken and do not like to be managed or controlled. This is not a recent trend, of course. It’s been ongoing for more than five years now but these days, it’s simply getting worst.

7. Anonymity is shunned. Back then it was fine to be an anonymous bloggers, but these days bloggers are expected to give up their privacy and show their face in their postings and their social media. I don’t know how it’s like for the rest of the world, but this is how blogging industry is like in Malaysia. While I am now fine with this as I too was an anonymous blogger who does not plaster any of my pictures online, but I think those who opt to be anonymous should be respected as long as their postings does not do any harm to anyone instead of being forced to be like the rest. We’re talking about one’s privacy and also individuality. Why should people be forced to give up their privacy just because everyone else is doing it?

8. Bloggers writes for the search engine more than for human readers. Well, it is undeniable that SEO and traffic is important for bloggers, especially if bloggers in question wants to commercialize their blog and increase the value for advertisement fees if they are engaged by any brands. But if the article came out incoherent for readers to read, what’s the point? Some even lowered themselves as to copy and paste controversial things like sensationalized gossips or play the racial card just so that they’d boost the traffic. Fine, do as you pleased but I rather have more human readers than crawling bots.

9. Bloggers don’t really support each other but treat one another as rival and competitors unless they belonged to their own circle of groups. Gone are the days where Malaysian bloggers really blog hop without being told and leave comments on each other’s postings. Okay, perhaps it is unfair to say that as there are still those who religiously blog hop to their friend’s blog, but these days, most comments are forced and forged via comment exchange programs hosted on Facebook Blogging Groups or IG pods where bloggers actually exchange comments with each other. It’s kinda like; you leave comments on my blog and I will leave comments on your blog kinda thing. Good initiative to make blogs look credible and merry with plenty of comments and discussion, but it’s still kinda sad that blogging are reduced to this, especially when those who participated in such activities sometimes left merely generic comments until they are being told off to be sincere and original. I always hated it when people do that. Such disrespect and dishonest as they are actually reaping the benefit of forged traffics without making much efforts. I hate it even more when I see some not returning favours, which defeat the purpose of the whole thing; which is to encourage discussions.

10. Platforms/FB Community that helps budding bloggers who genuinely want to start blogging out of passion are being misused. I won’t elaborate, but let’s thank God for admins who mostly do good job of monitoring the ongoing activities in their groups.

When I wrote this, I did not intend to make friends or form an alliance or a diplomatic relationship with those who are reading. I’m kinda hoping that things in the blogging scene in Malaysia will change for the better but I guess such things won’t really happen anytime soon.

That said, I end my write-up. Til next time.