EP #078: The Bot Problem: How Fake Engagement Is Distorting LinkedIn Performance

Your last LinkedIn post got 47 likes and 12 comments.

You feel good about it - the engagement is up, the numbers are climbing, and your LinkedIn strategy seems to be working. Then you look closer at those comments. 

"Really insightful." "Great post." "Thanks for sharing this." Not a single one references anything you actually wrote. If you read last week's newsletter about ghostwriters, you know I'm not shy about exposing what happens behind the scenes on LinkedIn. 

So let me show you another dirty secret: some of those LinkedIn services promising to boost your engagement are doing it with bots. And the ghostwriting agencies that use these tactics? 

They're counting on you never looking closely enough to notice.

Let Me Show You Exactly How They Do It

Here's how a bot operation typically works.

A ghostwriting agency - or a third party they hire - creates dozens or hundreds of LinkedIn profiles. Some use AI-generated headshots. You know the ones: slightly-too-smooth skin, dead eyes that don't quite track. 

Others steal photos from real professionals who will never know their face is attached to a fake account operating out of another country. The bios are vague enough to avoid scrutiny: "Marketing Professional | Passionate About Growth | Helping Businesses Succeed." 

Who's actually behind these accounts? Usually offshore click farms - operations in countries where labor is cheap enough to make running hundreds of fake profiles profitable. Sometimes it's the agency itself, managing a stable of fake accounts in-house. Sometimes it's a third-party service the agency contracts with so they can claim plausible deniability if a client ever asks. 

Other agencies skip the fake profiles entirely and use engagement pods instead. Pods are groups of real people who agree to like and comment on each other's content automatically, regardless of what the post says. The profiles look legitimate because they are - but the engagement is still manufactured. 

Either way, nobody reads anything, and nobody cares about the topic. The system exists purely to inflate numbers.

Now let me show you what happens to the posts you're paying for.

When you hire one of these services, your posts get pushed to the pod or the bot network. Within minutes - and I mean minutes, which should be your first red flag - you have 20 likes and a handful of comments. "Love this perspective." "So true!" "Thanks for sharing."

The comments are designed to work on literally any post ever written, because the people leaving them didn't read yours and couldn't summarize it if you asked.

Next, the ghostwriting agency sends you a report showing your engagement increased 300% since you started working with them. You're impressed, and you renew your contract…

…and you never realize that every single interaction came from accounts that will never buy from you, refer business to you, or remember your name exists.

How to Catch Them in the Act

Here's a fun exercise: go look at the profiles of people engaging with your content.

Legitimate engagement comes from accounts with actual professional histories - specific job titles at companies you can verify, genuine connections in your industry, original posts that show a real person using the platform. 

Fake engagement looks different. Those accounts were created in the last few months. They have minimal connections, no original content, and suspiciously identical engagement patterns across dozens of unrelated posts.

Now look at the comments. A real comment references something specific you said. "Your point about the Q3 pipeline challenges resonated - we dealt with the same issue last year." 

A fake comment could be copied and pasted onto any post on LinkedIn and still make logical sense. If "great insights!" could work equally well on a post about supply chain logistics and a post about someone's dog dying, it's probably not a real comment.

Pay attention to timing, too. Real engagement trickles in over hours or days as your post moves through different people's feeds. Pod engagement arrives in suspicious bursts - 15 likes in the first three minutes, then crickets for hours, because everyone in the pod knocked out their daily engagement obligation during their morning coffee.

Why Ghostwriting Agencies Love This Trick

Here's the part that should make you angry.

Some ghostwriting agencies use bots and pods because it solves their real problem: they need to show you results to justify their fees, and actually creating content good enough to earn real engagement is hard. 

So they take the shortcut. Buying fake engagement is easy, and it gives everyone what they want in the short term - the agency gets to point at growing numbers, you get to feel like your investment is paying off, and nobody asks too many questions. 

The client never knows their 30 likes came from bots, never realizes the comments saying "really insightful" were generated by someone who couldn't pick their post out of a lineup. The agency just needs the metrics to look good long enough to collect another month's payment.

And when real engagement doesn't follow? When the fake numbers don't translate into actual business opportunities? The agency blames the algorithm, suggests you need to post more, maybe recommends adding a newsletter to the package. 

Anything except admitting that manufactured engagement doesn't convert because there was never a real person on the other end.

The irony is that these approaches - especially the automated ones - will actually kill your engagement over time. LinkedIn's algorithm learns who engages with your content and shows it to similar profiles. 

Train the algorithm on bots and pod members, and LinkedIn stops showing your posts to the people who might actually do business with you.

You Can't Learn From Fake Data

Beyond the economic waste - you paid for something worthless - fake engagement destroys your ability to learn from your own content.

Think about it: you can't improve your strategy if your feedback is manufactured. When every post gets roughly the same number of bot likes regardless of quality, you lose the signal that tells you which topics resonate with your actual audience and which ones fall flat. 

The post where you shared a genuine insight about your industry gets the same response as the post where you phoned it in, because bots don't discriminate.

You end up unable to tell what's working because nothing you're measuring reflects reality.

Our Approach at EP 

At Executive Presence, we don't use bots or pods. I know - shocking that I'd mention this in my own newsletter.

Our approach involves actual writers who read your ideas, understand your expertise, and help you connect with real professionals who might actually do business with you someday. 

(Curious about who these writers are? I introduced all of them last week.)

So when someone comments on content we've helped create, that comment comes from a person who stopped scrolling because something caught their attention. 

The numbers might be smaller than what a bot service could manufacture, but one real connection can turn into a deal worth more than a thousand fake likes. 

After all, you can't build relationships with accounts that don't belong to actual humans.

— Justin

Justin M. Nassiri | Founder & CEO
M: 650.353.1138 | E: [email protected]
250 Fillmore St Suite 150, Denver, CO 80206
www.ExecutivePresence.io

Executive Presence specializes in helping top-tier executives boost their visibility, activate their network, and position themselves as thought leaders via our premium, fully-managed LinkedIn service.

Our unique process involves ex-McKinsey, BCG, and Bain consultants conducting monthly hour-long interviews with our clients, and turning them into impactful daily LinkedIn posts to establish their unique voice and authority. On average, our clients see a 500% bump in engagement in their first 30 days with us. Data is continuously analyzed to improve engagement and identify impactful messaging that you can use for conferences, podcasts, and internal communications.