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
In the past, two things were a clear indicator for bought followers:
If a large chunk of follower accounts did not have many friends themselves, chances were high that they are part of a paid service to artificially increase the page’s follower count.
Another red flag was, if the followers were largely from countries outside the page’s geographic location.
Nowadays, the same principles still apply, but it isn’t that easy to spot anymore because Facebook moved to only show you private profiles if they’re part of your friend list. Thus, today, you can only indirectly judge whether the page may have some bought followers, which we will discuss in a bit.
What has not changed is that 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.
At roughly one cent per follower (e.g., Socialwick sells 30k followers for $312.85), there is no room for genuine audience acquisition. Nobody is carefully finding niche-relevant humans, convincing them to follow, and delivering them for a penny each. That would be absurd even by internet marketing standards. The bottom line is bots, human-bot hybrids, click-farm workers that are now often called ‘human bots’ from low-wage countries, are all delivered to fool you into believing that the shiny and growing number at the top of the page is proof that the business is trusted and thriving.
Psychologically speaking, the reason why a high follower count matters in fooling you is, amongst other concepts we will discuss in part 2, informational social influence: people use other people’s apparent behavior as evidence for what is credible, valuable, safe, or worth paying attention to. In short: “If many people follow this person/page/business, there must be something there that could be beneficial for me and my dog as well.”
But, because you have lived on the internet for longer than five minutes and would find it suspicious if a person has 30k followers but no likes, comments, or shares, this is where buying followers is likely not creating the full ‘illusion’ to lure you into following and buying into whatever authority they want to sell. After all, the penny ‘workers’ won’t spend any time liking and sharing unless the page owner buys another, often slightly more expensive service and, more importantly, they won’t sell you the most convincing social proof indicator, which is niche relevant comments.
So, to come back to how to gauge whether a business page has bought followers: If the page has a larger following, let’s say 30k followers, that is still relatively rapidly growing, but has only a handful of comments, there is something fishy about that situation. It does not necessarily mean that followers were bought, but it is not an organic social media behavior for a growing page with that size following. We will look at this situation much closer below.
Because bought followers do not engage and that’s a fast giveaway to real people that something is off, a lot of businesses may start with buying a decent amount of followers but then move on to the next ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ tool:
Engagement Groups
In particular, on Facebook, many businesses that are impatient or have failed to organically create account growth and traction 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 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 it’s not laziness, it’s also a smart business move because the follows of business pages are visible to the public. Either way, if they do follow from a business page, 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, with one caveat: Facebook now publicly displays only other pages and your friends that follow a page. However, if you scroll through the followers and there are pages on pages of other business from the same niche displayed, it’s still very unlikely that this happened by a selfless interest to like a business page in the same niche. So, the issue is not that a business page has some other business pages among its followers. That can happen. The issue is volume and pattern. If one comparable page’s visible page-follower list ends quickly, while another keeps loading with same-niche business pages for scroll after scroll, that suggests the audience composition is- let’s phrase it with Southern politeness- meaningfully different.
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.
A little bit of a ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ engagement group self-own is that a lot of fellow business owners from the same niche will also use the comment section to information farm or respond to a post to indirectly sell their expertise to you. Once you understand what is happening, it is actually quite funny to watch how the people who ‘innocently’ want to ‘help’ each other succeed, try to steal your business in the process. It’s especially funny because it usually happens when the commented on account has accumulated some a larger following, which means that the informational social influence has taken a hold of them too.
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.
How Do We Know All This?
We led and trained the biggest German independent sales consultant team for a very well known American Network Marketing company. We’ve seen all of the above fake social media behaviors in that line of work 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.
