Educational post about engagements, fake followers and spambots.
Recently it has been common to decide if a project is hyped based on their number of Twitter followers or Discord members. Checking reactions on announcements or engagements on Twitter posts been done often as well.
When people see low engagement rate or absurdly high Discord members compared to activity, people used to scream rug/FUD/botted immediately.
But the reality is, these projects often do not bot themselves, people bot them to win Twitter giveaways or get invites and whitelists. The cost of a few hundred followers, invites or reactions to a message is paltry, so people are surely abusing it. And majority of Twitter follower auditers can’t point these fake followers out. (This does not mean all projects are “victims” of getting botted, lots of scam projects are using this filthy method to gain fake presence in the space.)
Knowing that just looking at the numbers of followers is not sufficient to decide if the hype is real, what to do? Thankfully multiple methods to check it.
On Twitter:
Engagements. The project has 100k+ followers but only 1-200 likes on posts? Definitely got botted. Twitter algorithm is weird, but usualy engagement around 1-2%+ considered to be good for the hyped projects. (Engagement on neutral ones are sub 1%, but the algorithm (should be) able to give higher engagement to these projects, especially NFT communities are hardly tied together.) Do not use giveaway posts for these engagement checks, use basic posts like some sneakpeaks, mint info or what should really interest people.
Replies/comments. Likes or followers might be botted, but just check the replies, how “human” does they look? See if people are interacting with eachother or just spamming “lfg” and other unhuman things.
On Discord:
Activity based on members: 50k+ members but chat is dry or only GM/GN and LFG WGMI messages? Definitely a turn off. Look for real conversations there. Nothing golden rate here, but you can just see if a project is active in there prior mint.
Generally:
Are people talking about this project in alpha groups, random threads, and are they raiding posts?
How many people are trying to get WLs? Are there a decent amount of arts, lores, and else what people to do to get a WL?
Concluding all these: of course it is impossible to set up a projects value based on their socials, but usually a good standpoint. It is more useful just to set aside a project if they try to fake hype through socials. Do not FUD or disgrace any projects just because a lower number of social outreach. Lots of good and honest projects are undervalued on socials just because they are not doing any giveaways or engagement farming to gain followers.