Inside the Underworld of Social Media Automation: Tim O'Hearn’s Marketing Journey

We see this crossover between cybersecurity, black

hat and white hat, and then marketing and search engine

optimization, black hat and white hat. The idea

behind black hat marketing, which then lends itself itself

to black hat social media growth, really

approaches it from the angle of what you're doing might not be explicitly

illegal, but you likely are affecting other

users on the platform.

That's good. And welcome to a new episode of

digital coffee marketing brew with I'm your host, Brett

Deister. If you could please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps,

you have a five star review, really does help with the rankings and let me

know how I am doing. But

this week, my guest is Tim and he is a software engineer who has

created some of the most pesky and effective bots to ever be

unleashed on social media. Between 2017

and 2022, his agency gained millions of

followers for its clients with generating hundreds of thousands of

dollars in revenue. In February 2025,

he debuted framed a villain's perspective on social media with a

number one release in social aspects on the internet

on Amazon. Framed is Tim's

confrontation confrontation with the Internet age delivered

by a video game cheater who outgrew gaming, but never stopped

breaking the rules. So welcome to the show, Tim.

Hey, Brett. Thanks for having me. And my first question is all my guests is,

are you a coffee or tea drinker? I'm more of a tea drinker. Tea

drinker. Do you have, any, like, specifics you like? Green, black, or you

just, like, whatever? I don't really care. Generally

speaking, I've really gotten into, sparkling teas recently.

So especially on the Korean dining scene here in New York

City, I found that there's some local producers or

bottlers, and I've enjoyed those a lot as an alternative

to, like, alcohol forward, menus. So, like, is, like,

green sparkling tea, like, sparkling water with tea, is that how it is?

I would say it's more like a de alcoholized,

champagne. It really had like, it still has many of the

notes that you would find in a glass of champagne except, no

bite. But then, of course, there is, like, caffeine content as well.

Got you. And so I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Could you give

our listeners a little bit more about what you do? I'm a software engineer.

I spent most of my twenties, writing code at a variety of

different businesses and different industries. A huge

portion of it was spent in the Instagram and social media

underworld, where beginning in 2017, I was pulled into this

space where misbehavior was rife, and people were

making large sums of money by violating the terms of service

of social media platforms. I was not an

inventor, of anything in this space, but I was certainly

a power user and someone who developed, some of the better botting

platforms, that I used and built a business on, throughout the late twenty

tens. Got you. And so what is Black

Hat Marketing? I know what Black Hat is because it is like the nefarious

hackers, but what is specifically pertaining to marketing?

We see this crossover between cybersecurity, black

hat and white hat, and then marketing and search engine

optimization, black hat and white hat. The idea

behind black hat marketing, which then lends itself to

black hat social media growth, really

approaches it from the angle of what you're doing might not be explicitly

illegal, but you likely are affecting,

other users on the platform. So you're likely violating social contracts,

and at worst, you're probably also violating terms

of use, which are not laws, but they are

provided by, private businesses as a condition of using a

platform. So black hat marketing really is doing these things that

are likely breaking the rules while not being the,

computer hacker type destructive behavior that maybe we'd commonly associate.

So just breaking their TOS, but not actually, like, breaching any

of the user data. Yeah. That's fair. And you

managed to generate over 500,000 through social media

growth strategies. Can you walk us through your most effective tactics to

actually move the needle? This number, is one that I

have proof of, but it's something that while I was doing it, we

didn't know what the number was because we were so often looking

at the Stripe dashboard of monthly recurring revenue. It's

only in retrospect when I was writing the book that I actually checked

Stripe one last time and saw we were we were over 500 k.

For us, the main learning or the main, I would say,

takeaway was that when you're running a social

media automation business or something vaguely related

to scraping, the profit margins are

exceptionally high. At Shark Social, which is the company

that I, you know, code named in my book, we're probably talking

about an 80% or higher profit margin. This is not,

totally new, for anyone in the software as a service space,

but what was useful for us was that we were running a software as a

service business, but our customers thought that

humans might have been the ones growing their accounts. So there is

definitely a little bit of deception there, which I have admitted to. And

when it comes to profit, you really are locking people in

to a month over month subscription, during which

our average customer value was

as high as a hundred $80. I think during the time period, like, there's

obviously fat tail, but during the time period, it was definitely over a hundred

dollars, which is pretty good. And so, I mean, even in your book, you

mentioned bot automa automa automaization.

So and with that, you're saying that you use bots to

get monthly things. So what how was it successful to use those bots? What were

the key metrics that you found to be targeted to be successful in

gaining all that revenue? Even as far back as 2016 or

2017, Instagram had some threshold

of how many actions any user could take per day. It

doesn't matter if it's you sitting there tapping. It doesn't matter if it's me,

with my bot, you know, just continually doing something, just in

cyberspace. There were these bounds of how many actions you could

take per day before you might face a block or a ban or other

types of restrictive action. What made

the programs I created and manipulated so

successful was this abuse of the human

tendency to reciprocate. And on

Instagram, it was very, very easy to find or to

target certain content or certain creators in a niche and

say, hey, I can send maybe 300,

two hundred 50 actions per day to this account and

related accounts, and I can expect that I'll receive

actions back at a rate of roughly 10%.

So even on a per per day basis, that could be as many as 20

or 30 actions back. Over the course of a month,

many smaller accounts and even what you would say micro influencers

would be more than happy to get hundreds and hundreds of

real organic ish follows back per month. So that was

really the core, the core value in this system, which is

broadly, termed follow unfollow. Yeah. And

so, I mean, how how do you what do you have the insider

tips online on, like, performing well organically? Because everybody knows

now with Metta, they don't like organic

stuff anymore. They really want you to pay to play now. And it's kind of

like, if you don't pay to play, you don't get the eyeballs or the

actions as you say. So are there any tips to actually still

do that? Because I know it's getting harder and harder because the

algorithm just ruins everything, my personal belief, because it's just

it's just for them to make money. One of the

concerns that was brought up, when we first started facing

actions, you know, anti botting measures, was that Meta

cared less about the user experience, and they cared more that

we had found this shortcut to not having to purchase ad space.

And what you say is right on, Brett. Like, the problem

is that now everybody who remembers how good coverage

was, how good exposure was five or ten years ago

is now trying to pursue the same content strategies and

effectively getting forced to run ads or at least to experiment with

boosting a post. One, there's less space. And

two, as you say, the algorithms have kind of been designed

now to trick us into doing this. I would say that to some extent,

this organic interaction still holds weight. And

I can say this even now as someone in the second life as an

author promoting his book. It is meaningful to reach out to

journalists or to other authors or to people who I think would like to read

my book and say, hey. I know a little bit about you. I've read your

research paper. I've read read your past work. Here's a free copy of my

book. That type of outreach, even if it's cold, still

works to some extent, but it's so so time consuming.

You know, in the time that I could do a thousand with bot programs

I've created, I could maybe only do 20 or

30 personalized bits of outreach. And that's where, like,

there's this this awkward it's it's like, what has software really

allowed us to do if we're basically just having to take out the phone book,

you know, look up the directory and, you know, figure out someone's life story before

we contact them anyway. Right? It's kind of forced us into a more traditional

way of, building relationships. And so how do you how do you capitalize that?

Because, I mean, we talked about how the algorithm has changed. Should your

content strategy drastically change? Because, like, the

new thing was reels, now it's not as

popular or it's too popular where even if you

post a reel, it doesn't really mean you're going to really going to gain, gain

traction. Should you use some, some pictures again? Should you use

some regular videos stories? Like, is it just a mix

of everything, or do you have to, quote, unquote, go viral,

which, I mean, always changes every day. And I know every business is like, we

wanna go viral. And I'm like, okay. Yeah. And I've even seen this

with past guests on your podcast. This comes up a lot

where people are talking about how to beat the algorithm.

Fundamentally, there is a way because understanding

exactly how it works, provides some value. But

also, it's nearly impossible and it's extremely

costly to even hypothetically understand what the algorithm is

doing. As you say, Brett, it changes day over day, and it also

changes in ways that aren't easily explainable in English.

So there's no way we can really go and know for sure, that a

campaign that was successful seven years ago will be successful in

2025 into 2026. My recommendation

is that there's definitely some benefit in trying to be platform

agnostic. So creating content, distributing it on

several different platforms, and kind of seeing what works. And then I

think the ultimate, agnostic approach would be to centering

things around a mailing list. If you have more written content, if you

have richer content that is not based around pictures and

videos, we definitely have seen this flight to

Substack and Beehive and other similar platforms now

where, people are saying it's been the easiest,

new medium to monetize, especially in the last couple years.

So basically go back to old school email marketing because that thing

has been told to ad nauseam that it's going to die

and it still never dies. I mean, I think I've seen

that for the past ten years. It's finally dead. Social media is taking over.

TikTok is taking over. And then it's like, well, it's not really dead. It's

actually thriving. It's a very difficult conversation because

each person who has built a business and perhaps an agency in

social media, they don't want to admit how little they understand.

My perspective is unique because I broke the rules, which means getting very,

very close to truth. And then later, I was employed by a

software startup where I actually built persuasive technology systems. So

I never worked at Meta, but I mean, we came pretty damn close to getting

an understanding of how this stuff really works. The truth is that nobody knows how

it works and that chasing viral, exposure

is still valid and prospecting for leads

by way of fans, on some of these distribution

platforms, social media platforms, is still valid. But I wonder

how many people it's really useful for and, really

with the saturation we see today, how many people are getting meaningful,

you know, meaningful stats out of it considering how much time it takes up. I

only say, like, I criticize going viral only because it feels

like everybody's chasing the past trend of going viral. And I feel like

a lot of times people need to understand that going viral means you need to

be unique and a little bit different from what has already happened.

Yeah. That's true. And I've explored it in a few places in

my book where I really pay, you know, I pay a tribute to the

early Internet and what it really meant. And one of the most

interesting, discoveries or hypotheses that I proposed

was that on early YouTube, it was very rare that

content went viral from the jump. If I

can think about the 10/20, '30 most significant

videos from founding through twenty eleven, twenty

ten, we'd find that almost all of them

were uncovered much later. And they were men maybe

promoted by a an aggregation channel like Ray William Johnson back

in the day, or they were even hand selected by

YouTube's editors. People forget that originally, some of the top

videos were manually selected as

YouTube was actually in this era during the dying days of what we

remember as directory sites, where you would have a webmaster telling you

what the top content was. So what you're saying is is very much

true in that these are older patterns. And now

that we're trying to, have the same

success when the algorithms have extremely aggressive

time decay functions, you must go viral

immediately because otherwise you'll get completely buried.

And I think we see a lot less discovered viral

content and, you know, we see this, this almost standardization,

this formulaic approach of what people think they have to do.

In a lot of cases, that involves compromising, either their values

or really what their content should be about. So could we say that's the TikTok

effect of the time decay of virality? Because I

feel like TikTok kind of, like, catapulted that where YouTube wasn't

as bad at it at it, but now they are since they have shorts.

LinkedIn has shorts now. I mean, all basically, almost all of them have

a short function now. I would say that shorts are

what completed this this this transitional

period. As far as time decay functions, they've

always existed to some extent, and there is some,

like, academic exploration of how

Reddit's top posts work. But on Reddit, you get a

little bit more of a reprieve. If you actually look at how their

time decay function of each upvote relative to

downvotes works, you get many days potentially.

And that's why in some subreddits, you might look at you look at something and

you're so used to seeing the newest thing on TikTok or the

newest thing on Instagram. I'm often surprised to find,

I'm getting posts at the top of my feed that were posted three to five

days ago. And so there are different aspects of time decay. I

think Reddit does a decent job of holding this middle ground. But as you said,

in short form, a lot of the times, it's prioritizing

the absolute newest content. And so working with these influential

accounts, I mean, what have you noticed that drives the actual consistent

engagement? Because that's what we all want. We don't want the consistent engagement,

not the one hit wonder, and you're like, well, what happened? How did that work?

If somebody's on a platform for entertainment purposes, and

I think broadly a lot of people are. I I kind of explore this

from, you know, this this idea of Pletchik's wheel of emotions,

and we're trying to experience this whole entire spectrum of

different emotions, but every emotion pretty much has, you

know, an opposite emotion that is quite negative. So it encourages

creators to maybe post things that make people feel on both

sides of it. I mean, just broadly saying they want some drama. They want

some controversy. And when you have people on a platform who are

looking more for this short form entertainment, that tends to

perform much better compared to, like, a twenty minute video

on some niche thing that happened during World War two.

Right? So, like, we have these these broad broad,

splits of, of different users, these partitioning, these

partitioning of user groups. What I saw that was most successful

during my Instagram phase was overwhelmingly

those cheap fast food content

type pages. So we're talking about, models. So we're

talking about things that are, perhaps, sexualized.

We're talking about people who are effectively doing stunts

or just, like, very, very in your face, attention grabbing

type entertainment content and, things that are just, generally speaking, very

aesthetically pleasing. So, like, hey. We're gonna post nice pictures

of of the beach. Not to say there's anything wrong with

this, but I think anyone putting more nuance, behind

their content on these platforms is probably suffering and finding they have to

go to YouTube and they have to build a very niche audience compared to,

what they're competing against. Does this also rely on,

like, the different genders, male or female? Does it mean

that maybe females like more drama than males? Or

is it just kinda apolitical and it doesn't matter? People just want the drama. Do

people just want, I guess, spilling the tea? In

my very, very blue collar research, I

found big differences between how this plays out on

each platform. Specifically on Facebook,

I think we do see this much more,

demographic based, filtering where, if you

find yourself in, you know, what's been called a filter bubble, those most

commonly exist on Facebook for whatever reason, where

we find, oh, there's a group, there's a piece of content, and now you're in

another group. And the idea behind filter bubbles or why it's become a

dirty word is that it eventually becomes an echo chamber

that, you know, tends to be more and more extreme. And that

facts go to more like a facts laced with opinion and the

facts aren't really provable and it's just conspiracy theories, which as we

know, there's some basis in political and, like, propaganda type

things. On other platforms, I haven't found as

strong of a relationship between what one gender is

doing, versus another. I'm

positive that the base feed that one would

get on Instagram versus on TikTok, like, when you create a

new account, of course it's taking into account your gender because that's

one of the only, bits of demographic information it has.

But how that actually plays out, I'm not sure. Like we

doing research there would require so

such resource it's so like the

resources required are just crazy. And that's why we can only get these little tiny

anecdotes of people saying, hey, I created 10 accounts and here's what happened 10 times.

Rather than saying, hey, we ran 10,000 simulations and it cost us a million

dollars. Could that be the next frontier of AI figuring out, like,

if this actually happens? Because I feel like AI could do this a lot quicker

than us doing, like, 50 to a hundred different counts and trying to

see which one happens. In understanding social media,

if we really want true algorithmic, you know, transparency,

and that's something I address in a couple different chapters of my book, starting

in chapter four, which is called algorithms and truth. We start

saying, what's the platform's responsibility

to fact check? Do they have to fact check every piece

of the millions of pieces of original content they get per day?

Do they have to say this image was manipulated? This text

doesn't represent facts? What is the responsibility of the

platform? Very controversial. But what we don't realize is

that if we live in a world where the platform does have the

responsibility, for the platform to actually

be providing this information in a way that is explainable

in plain English, so not only this is what the content

is, but then also this is why Brett was

shown this content. I estimate we're probably talking

two orders of magnitude of compute data storage

throughput costs to be able to provide that at all levels in

a way that was auditable, for example, by a central authority.

So, yes, as resources maybe become

more collected and you get these, let's say we have

billionaires who really, really care about, uncovering this stuff.

Yes. You could throw a ton of resources behind it and better understand

these things, but, even what we're talking about now is

above, way beyond the understanding of of many people. It would be hard

to, make an impact there. And I think we did see

Meta try to do some fact

checking, but apparently that didn't even Zuckerberg

admitted that it really wasn't fact checking. It was opinion based,

like, feeling more. So I'm

on the, I'm on the end of a political platforms just

because people need to figure it out for themselves. I know they use

AI to actually do a lot of different types of decisions, but my

appealing is do your fact checking. You have AI now. If

you really need to use that to fact check, then do it that way. But

I think social platforms need to stay out of that. I agree with you on

this. The point I make in the book is that we already had

two generations grow up with the Internet, and nobody was

looking out for us. It was up to us to do fact checking in

ways that in 2006 or 02/2007, when you

received, like, chain email about Lil Wayne being dead or some

celebrity being dead, you had to actually dig pretty deep to find

out if it was true or not. And I think that was

a separate like, this major separation of generations of where

we had to do the work and form our own opinions, where now

later generations have shown up, including older generations in The United States

who are newly, like, tech literate, are now coming with totally different

expectations. So I'm with you there. There's no way you're gonna keep everyone happy,

and there's no way you can establish, you know, universal truth

for every piece of content. And then moving on to, like, shadow banning

because you also mentioned that. And plus, for those that don't know,

shadow banning is kind of like you aren't really banned, but you're banned

because you don't know that you're actually banned. So it's kind of in the shadows

and you just don't know. So how can markers avoid

getting that reach limit from being shadow banned? Because I feel

like sometimes markers are like, why is this getting no reach now?

Shadow bans are very controversial, because

as a public figure, you can also,

harness this idea of a shadowban to explain why you're not

more popular. So if you look on Urban Dictionary, which is a

source that was extremely useful for my book, you

can see how the definition of shadowbanning evolved

from 02/2007 to 2010

to 02/2012, and it evolved from web forums. So,

like, these pre Reddit type forums, to then people talking

about Twitter, to then people just talking about this general, like,

tech kleptocracy, right, where you just have way, way,

way, too much, influence from the tech from the

platforms that nobody really understands, how to

stay on their good side or even how to determine if they are themselves shadow

banned. So that's the unique thing that you say. It's like a ban, but it's

not really a ban. Because if it was a ban, the phones would be

ringing off the hook, so to speak. The support tickets that would be getting

filed would be crazy. But for a shadow ban, you actually

have to think a lot more critically and maybe do your own tests. Ask

your friend, hey can you see my content? Or you know start thinking

statistically why can only one one hundredth of the audience

see my content now? It's an effective tool but

it's also very, very controversial for that reason. So, yeah, shadow

bans aren't going anywhere. Meta has come out with a blog

post talking about shadow bans, in which I cover in my

book, they don't give many satisfactory answers. So, yeah, it

continues to be this fringe topic that a lot of people proclaim,

knowledge of when, as we said, with with algorithms and other

things, you cannot be a true expert as an

outsider. And to be fair, one side if you're in politics,

one side says it's more often on their side than the other side. So there

is that at play too. And since from what I've

seen just looking at it, it seems like one side was heavily targeted

more because they were willing to, I guess, talk about the

controversial topics that maybe these platforms didn't want them to talk

about. And so that's why it became more prevalent on one side than

the other. This is true. And I think now, hopefully, we're

getting to the stage where we can have normal discourse. Again, we can kind

of discuss these things and say, That that wasn't right. Like,

that should never have happened. I wade into this,

very, like, gingerly in my book where I'm like, hey. We'll

keep it apolitical, but some of these people have really good points

that it's unpopular, but it still should be covered under

free speech. And whenever a platform can

create these, I would say, systems for algorithmic

interference, that's very, very dangerous. Because not just

for political you know, the highest level political stuff, but what about

even if there's like a local corruption case and you can't find

information on it, you can't discuss it because somebody paid

50,000. You know, it's it's really, really dangerous and it's a

really slippery slope. The one example I give in my book

is that many many years ago when Donald Trump was elected,

I did like a Facebook live video because I lived in Chicago and there

was actually like a major protest. And I did a Facebook live, where

I was basically trying to be a comedian. And what I

found so funny was that when I searched for this video, which is now like

whatever, like seven or eight years later, I couldn't find it on

Facebook. So and I titled it Trump

Riot. And so I searched for Trump Riot, it didn't come up.

When I removed the term Trump and just typed riot, I could

find it. And I could type Trump or any iteration of

of Trump riot whatever. I can only find it when I remove the term Trump.

So it kind of suggests that this was way beyond a conspiracy theory. I'm

just a random guy who was then writing a book because I thought I was

funny when I was 22 years old, and then much later realized

that there's still algorithmic interference on me

searching my own content that contains the word Trump.

And so, I mean, based on automation, what tasks should

marketers automate versus handle manually for best results? Because I

think that's what we're all thinking about is, like, there's so many things to do,

especially for social media. How do we automate effectively?

This is really tough, and I I realized that you just had a guest

who said, hey. You have to use AI or you're going to fall behind as

a marketer. I do not subscribe to that,

philosophy at all. For me, as a writer and

someone who spent years focusing on the craft, there's

currently no substitute for being a good

writer or having a critical thinking ability that,

enables you to kind of handle, you know, handle things as

they as they come up. Right? To have a little bit more, dynamism in

your approach to problem solving and to stimuli. Whether

that's, yeah, you you know, cold emails or whether it's outreach or whether

it's just things that happen to you on a daily basis. AI is a

tool and automation is a tool. But for me, I

can look at my book marketing efforts now and say, anytime I've tried

to use any type of automation, it's gone

pretty poorly. The only part that I

think, we have some success with or I've had some success with

is just generally some things for lead generation.

I would struggle to say that AI, generative AI, has

improved lead generation. People claim that it's improved

outreach. I think any person who claims that it improves

outreach is just a really shitty writer because that's not true. And

every time I get AI outreach, I throw it away. It looks

terrible and it's never actually personalized. It's just using big words

and hyphens. Like, for me, like, lead generation is

pretty is pretty useful, and I think some automation there. Okay. If you could scrape

the if you could scrape in and get a little bit more information from the

person, if you could actually get their LinkedIn, If I could have maybe some

summaries of research, if somebody's an academic, that's nice.

But I'm still very much in this pure state where, we're

going over and directing way too much on,

AI. And the automation plays that I use at the core of my

business, specifically for follower growth, are largely

forbidden now. It's almost impossible to do them at

scale. If somebody wants to try to do them, homegrown on their

laptop, there are services specifically on LinkedIn

for whatever reason, where you can do it.

But I want people to know that people like me are out there

looking for you. And I know these comments and you've probably seen them already

where you can tell somebody is running a bot that does a little bit of

context and analysis, and then it leaves an AI generated comment. And it's

like, what's the point? I mean, I use it for, like, doing

show notes and finding the best stuff for my stuff because it's a good tool,

and I don't have to spend hours trying to figure all that stuff out. But

I do agree with you. I mean, one of my other shows, I actually read

the article, but I have AI give me the bullet points. But I still read

it, so I understand what I'm talking about and not having AI

just do everything for me. So I'm more in a balanced state,

but I do agree with you that you need to understand how to write and

you need to understand how to critically think. Because if you give everything to AI,

then you aren't gonna be critically thinking ever. Right. People are listening

to this podcast, they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more about

what you do and your book. Yeah, Brett. The main place, that people

could find more about me is probably on Amazon where I'm

selling framed both in the paperback and Kindle

versions. We're also currently working on the audiobook, which I'm

hoping to release later this summer. Those who do read the

book and want to read even more, will be happy to know that

I do have a Beehive mailing list. So it's tim ohearn dot

beehive dot com. And for much more long form stuff,

going back almost a decade now, I have a variety blog at

tjohearn.com. My main social media platform,

is actually LinkedIn. And there I'm Tim Ohearn. And any final

thoughts for listeners? Brett, it's been a pleasure to be on this podcast. I

know we've been, anticipating it for a couple months now. So I just wanna say

thank you for having me on. Yes. And thank you, Tim, for joining Digital Coffee

Marketing Brewing, sharing your knowledge on social media AI and

bots. Thank you. And thank you for listening. As always, please

subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasting apps with a five star review.

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And join me next week as I talk about what's going on in

the PR and marketing industry. Alright, guys. Stay safe. Get to understanding how you can

use automation to the best ability, and don't get shadow banned. And see you

next week. Later.