A lot of profiles on social media are not real. Fake social media accounts, primarily causes trust issues between sellers on social media and consumers buying products and services from producers. However, one way to solve this problem is by cross checking profiles with government verified ID.
Lack of authenticity and trust on social media platforms negatively effects the producers business sales. Many businesses actively use social media to generate sales and because of the fake accounts they can not trust the users inquiring about buying products, whether they are real buyer or scammer. Producer becomes hesitant to offer cash on delivery. This is important because in areas like Pakistan and India consumers prefer not to pay upfront and prefer to pay with cash on delivery. Therefore, the seller looses on the extra revenue, which the business could have earned. For Example, majority of teenagers purchasing goods with social media, don’t have access to credit card because they are underage. Hence they prefer to pay via cash.
Social media platforms can solve this problem by implementing a regulated KYC account verification system against government ID of the user. When the users creates profiles, they must add their ID documents to cross check whether the name and details of that user is correct or not. It would allow any user to not to have more than 1 active profile. This helps to mitigate the amount of fake profiles being created on social media platforms and it would directly strengths the ties between the business and the consumer. Allowing the users to trust each other on social media platforms, which will increase the overall sales of the business and reputation of the platform. For example, Linkedin is the most popular platform for B2B sales, as the users know all profiles are verified because it’s compulsory for users to validate their account with their government ID.
In conclusion, fake social media accounts can cause trust issues which can negatively deteriorate the sales of the business. However, systems like KYC account verification can be implemented to ensure all profiles are verified and there is not any loop hole for any scammer to create a fake profile and place false orders to the business.