Want to game your LinkedIn and social engagement?

This may backfire HARD – if you don’t trust me, follow D A N I E L H. and read up his latest reveals of fake influencers on the platform.

Why game social engagement? 🤷‍♂️

Entrepreneurs, marketers, solopreneurs, growth hackers always look for effective ways to maximize each channel.

💫 For content, it’s SEO and keyword stuffing, link building, pillar hacks
💫 For email, it’s viral clickbait and catchy headlines, gaming engagement to keep open and response rates high
💫 For social – what content formats work? How to spark more comments? How to increase engagement rates?

Why are hacks even possible? 👀

Hacks work whenever there’s an alignment between the platform/framework desires and the outcome of the hack.

Hackers gaming the system means higher engagements, clout, more revenue opportunities (courses, speaking engagements, services, etc.)

These engagements are gray area. Some rules are violated (automated engagements or forced commenting) while others are kept (providing content that sticks, increasing view times, bringing other users on board from one network to another).

Social networks make money from ads and paid services in their platforms. As long as more people stay in and upgrade, the business makes money and tolerates hacks until they cross a line.

What makes fake engagements so dangerous? ❌

1. Hacked engagements may kill your profile. If you’re caught, you may get banned for good.

2. In the meantime, your brand may suffer. Random dumb comments such as “Great post!” are pretty obvious. If a true prospect follows you, they will see the same repetitive, unrelated comments or 5,000 likes and 5 comments in, neither making any sense.

3. Buying engagement has a negative connotation for a reason. Reference: all Instagram fitness or beauty influencers selling snake oil.

4. Automated tools are cheap and freelancers sell these services for peanuts. It’s easy to fall prey and buy into the global influencer vision, especially in times of recession and desperation.

There are different levels of engagement hacks.

Automated DM outreach comes off as spammy and disturbing. This has direct correlation to people’s mental health, stress levels, and time wasted.

Automated pods are a voluntarily group of people who agree on interacting with each other. There are SOME cases where this is fine – such as startups boosting one another to gather more views (just like they pitch everyone at tradeshows), but many pods fail the quality check or even distribute misinformation.

Gaming systems are a short-term reward for high-risk and long-term brand damage.


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My name is Mario Peshev, a global SME Business Advisor running digital businesses for 20 the past years.

Born in Bulgaria, Europe, I gained diverse management experience through my training work across Europe, North America, and the Arab world. With 10,000+ hours in consulting and training for organizations like SAP, VMware, CERN, I’ve dedicated a huge amount of my time to helping hundreds of SMEs growing in different stages of the business lifecycle.

My martech agency DevriX grew past 50 people and ranks as a top 10 WordPress global agency and Growth Blueprint, my advisory firm, has served 400+ SME founders and executives with monthly ongoing strategy sessions.


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