The Dog Wellness Industry: Fake it ‘til you make it: Facebook Edition
When it comes to “fake” followers and engagement on social media, there are many articles written to protect business owners from investing money in a dud influencer. However, articles that focus on dog guardians to protect them from dodgy products and services are scarce or nonexistent. Given our unique path into the wonderful world of dogs professionally, let’s look at how people try to fabricate authority on Facebook to sell their products and services to you.
Faking Organic Follower Counts
The first reasonable step to protect your dog when you see a pet-related business page with a sizable or growing following is to look at the followers, rather than taking the number as an uncontested authority signal. Who is following the account?
Bought Followers
If a large chunk of follower accounts do not have many friends themselves, chances are high that they are part of a paid service to artificially increase the page’s follower count. Another red flag is if the followers are largely from countries outside the page’s geographic location. There are plenty of questionable services that sell followers. Depending on their model, they sometimes promise real niche followers, not bots, delivered over weeks or months to mimic “organic growth”.
In reality, the only thing that’s organic or real is the seller’s growing bank account via the desperate or ego-driven business owners that don’t really care whether any of these promises are true or not, as long as the bought followers do not trigger the algorithmic gods.
Engagement Groups
In particular, on Facebook, many businesses that are impatient or have failed to naturally create account growth will rely on engagement groups. This is what’s commonly known as the good old “like for like” or “engagement trains”. The deal is that people in the group like each other’s business pages and sometimes comment, like, and share their content, supposedly to boost their visibility on social media. Often these groups are niched down, so the interest seems more genuine. After all, you feel less like a Facebook fraud if you can convince yourself that you share an interest. To conceal this fake follower and engagement behavior from the public, people often switch to a burner account or their private profile.
Because people are often too lazy to switch back and forth between business and private accounts, they also follow other people’s business pages with their business page profiles. If they do, it’s easy to spot. If you go to someone’s followers and you see long lists of other businesses, often in the same niche, that’s likely not an innocent coincidence.
Fake Engagement
You can spot fake engagement that’s connected to engagement groups in particular if you see a lot of questions that seem either generic, like: “great post”, just an emoji, or too neat a follow-up question that seems suspiciously handing the person an additional chance to perform some more cheeky display of whatever they offer on a plate. Comparatively long, polished comments that mirror the post’s sentiment ending in a question, are very common in that regard.
Inflated Share Counts
One of the biggest telltale signs that engagement on a social media account is not organic is looking at the ratio of shares to likes and comments. Business owners, especially those worried about their social media presence, spend hours scouring the internet for the magic bullet to success. When it comes to social media, they usually quickly find that shares outrank likes on the algorithm scale, but not necessarily comments. However, what’s easier? Hitting the share button in hopes that the other business will return the favor or write a comment? Of course, sharing is fake caring. So, if you see disproportionate share counts in comparison to likes and comments, that’s a very good indication that the page in question is engaging in some shady Facebook “business”.
Per a Socialinsider 2026 benchmark report, the rough “normal” Facebook brand distribution is:
15 likes : 1.3 comments : 1 share.
In other words, shares are normally far below likes, and comments are also below likes, but shares are not supposed to equal or exceed likes in ordinary organic brand-page behavior.
So if you see:
Pattern/ Read
100 likes, 8 comments, 5 shares Normal-ish
100 likes, 3 comments, 80 shares Not normal organic distribution
30 likes, 1 comment, 40 shares Extremely weird unless there is a specific sharing mechanic (e.g. a contest)
12 likes, 0 comments, 48 shares Artificial/coordinated-looking, or distributed through some non-normal channel
Additionally, Facebook now has a public feature that lets you see stats for posts that garnered more than 10k views, showing what may have led to the increase. If there’s a disproportionate view stat and comparatively low likes and comments, while shares are comparatively high, it’s another indicator that the post had artificial reach but didn’t convert outside the artificial amplification bubble. If a post underperforms inside the real world, away from all the authority theater, it’s not a good sign.
Family Spamming
The most popular alternative by way of controlling the output is also to spam your own page and posts into dozens of groups to fool people on your own page into thinking the content must be valuable enough to get shared a lot. Because, after the third time doing that, no one in these groups gives a hoot about the annoying little shack of a business that apparently no one wants. Why else would the person spamming it, or else the group member thinks.
The most preferred spam version: find some poor family member, usually the spouse or close friend, because they can keep a secret, who spams for you, so no one, including Facebook, can say you’re the spammer:
“Me? I didn’t share my post in 44 groups. I don’t know who that was. 😟 My husband? Chucks, but I have no control over what other people are doing, even my worse half. How unfair you’re accusing me of this behavior.”
What’s true in that statement is that the “my eyes are blind to spamming” person certainly has no control over their business.
We’ve seen all of the above fake social media behaviors in network marketing day in and day out, and while we’ve always called them the shortcut to failure in business, from a consumer standpoint, the behavior makes it very reasonable to stop and look twice before trusting that business with your dog’s well-being. Because most people who fake social media authority do not stop there.
More to Come
Come back for Part 2, in which we’ll discuss what additional shady practices exist to make you buy into dog businesses’ supposed authority and why they’re not a trivial or acceptable offense.
Did we forget to mention a bad “fake it ‘til you make it” trick you know about? Do you have any experience that you’d like us to share to protect fellow dog guardians from harm? Send us an email, and we’ll consider writing about them.
