Social Trap
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Too Many To ListHey everyone today I’m doing what is possibly the hardest review I have ever done. The thing that makes it had is that I have a real and true moral conflict. You see the product Im reviewing is by Mehdi Tihani. I have worked with this guy before. Promoting his products and him promoting mine. […]
Hey everyone today I’m doing what is possibly the hardest review I have ever done. The thing that makes it had is that I have a real and true moral conflict. You see the product Im reviewing is by Mehdi Tihani. I have worked with this guy before. Promoting his products and him promoting mine. Also I feel like continuing to work with him might lead to some really good exposure for myself and the products I create. The problem is his latest WP Plugin which Im about to review is total junk. Even worse he knows it, but is going to release it anyway!
Its scheduled for release on April 24th and he gave me a review copy to look at. I had a lot of internal conflict on what to do. To be 100% honest I considered promoting it for a second to further advance myself. But that thought only lasted a second. No matter how much it will benefit me I just can’t bring myself to promote a product that is not good. Then I thought well I could compromise and just ignore it and pretend like he never gave me a review copy. But that goes against the heart of what I’m doing with this blog. I know of a bad product that’s going to soon be released with much hype and fan fair. I know people are going to waste their money on this one. How can I just sit here and do nothing when I have the opportunity to tell people the truth? The answer is I cant! So Mehdi, Im sorry if this one makes you mad, I’m sorry if it ruins any chance of a future business relationship between us. But I have to be loyal to the people who trust me to be honest.
Here is a 100% totally honest review of Social Trap: Being released by Mehdi Tihani on April 24th 2014
Ok so the basic idea of this plug in is that it puts a pop up over your website that forces people to like your fan page our website before they can continue to the site. You can optionally have a countdown time that will cause it to auto close and also have a manually close button if yu choose. The sales page preview I was shown goes on to say things like this pop up will “turn visitors into fans and traffic generating magnets!”
This entire thing is full of problems. First let my start with the concept. The sales page is very misleading about what happens when someone likes your fan page or website. They want you to believe that every time a person clicks the like button it shows in all their friends timelines and everyone else is going to see this and suddenly go to your website themselves. Well sorry to say. That’s NOT going to happen. In fact you dont have to take my word for it. Go to your Facebook home page right now and look at your timeline. What do you see? You see things your friends have posted and shared. What dont you see? You dont see the fan pages and websites that your friends have liked! Facebook does not show this. Why? Because people like so many things every day if they did the entire timeline would be nothing but like notices. So right from the jump this plugin’s entire concept is flawed and the sales copy is deliberately misleading you.
Lets continue and see what else this is suppose to do. The sales page I was shown also says that this will allow you to “market to and connect with on demand”. They are talking about the fans. Saying you can market to them and connect to them on demand for free. They even go on to say that this is better than an email list because auto responders charge more when your list gets bigger. Are they kidding! Market to and connect to your fans for free? I guess they never heard of ‘edge rank’ eh? I guess they forgot about the fact that Facebook is only going to show your posts to 10% or so of you fans unless you pay to boost the post? I guess they forgot that even out of those 10% there is no guarantee that people actually read the post, it just means that Facebook put the post on 10% of your fans timelines. If you actually want to connect with and market to your Facebook fans you have to pay to boost the post. That is pay every single time you have a message to tell them. The sales copy flat out deceives you.
The plug in itself is not very well written. Features dont work correctly and lots of features that should be in it are missing. There is no stats. It would have been great to see how many people choose to let the time run out, or how many people click the close button instead of the like button (if you have the close button option on) etc. But there is no stats at all. Also there could have been other cool features like Share to continue. This would actually have had some value since share’s do show on your friends timelines unlike likes. But the creator of this plug in opted not to add any of this. Why you wonder? Well he told me why. He said its because he didn’t want to spend the money to add features. He just wanted to develop something quick and simple that he thought people would still buy. Here is a conversation I had with him on Skype.
I hit Mehdi up on Skype and pointed out all of the missing features and flaws with this plug in. Including the fact that likes have little value:
I also suggested that since he was a while away from launch he still had time to improve it. I Even though he agreed that this was lacking he had no interest in creating a quality product. Instead wanting to sell this poor quality version first and then do a second version later, I even offered to fix it for him, so that it would then be a quality product I could feel comfortable promoting. Notice I didn’t even ask him to pay me to make the plug in a good one and he still declined without even a thought.
In the sales page he claims that he has gotten thousands of new likes from this plug in. Well I wanted to see if this was true or not. I wanted to see if the creator of this plug in felt confident enough in it that he was actually using it himself. So I asked him to link me to his WordPress site that he is using it on. His response was even more shocking than I expected!
Ok whats so shocking? He says he removed the plugin from his website because he wants to focus on growing his Facebook page. But I thought this plugin was going to “convert traffic to the site into life long Facebook fan page fans”? I thought this plug in DID grow your fan page? If so why would he remove it from his site if he wants to grow his fan page? The only answer can be because he knows this plug in is total garbage. Its so bad he wont even use it himself! Even when he is doing what the plug in is suppose to do for you.
The final nail in this plugins coffin happened when I decided to look at the actual plugin code. This is something that most people will not do but that I often do. What I found blew me away!
Do you see it there? Its kind of small so I circled it for you. This plug in is not even original. Its based off of a FREE software that was released 2 years ago under the GPL license. That is they didn’t even write this themselves. Now its very common for programmers to use each other library’s but the fact that the copyright notice does not identify specific functions indicates that it applies to the entire thing, the whole plug in. All they did was take a free plug in, change it a little, write a bunch of misleading copy for a sales page, and now they are trying to sell it to people!
I have promoted products for Mehdi before. But unfortunately I have to say this one is no good for far to many reasons. It focuses more on misleading sales copy than on creating a quality product. I will not recommend this one at all. Its deceiving and it offers so little value that even the guy who made it does not want to use it. It really looks like the people promoting this are more interested in making a quick buck then in creating a quality usable product. Worse yet they have no problem using deceiving copy in order to get you to buy. Its such a shame.
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A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.
About the Author
That’s shocking. There is some garbage out there. Good on you for helping people avoid it!
You might have lost a ‘business partner’, but what you’ve gained is priceless instead.
MASSIVE credibility amongst those who have come to heed your words of advice in the shark infested IM world.
Tony.
Funny you moderated out my first comment considering I was sharing a real life experience with Mehdi. I took out my valuable time to put all that in, solely because I felt you are someone who speaks on behalf of those who fall victim to IM scams. But apparently not always the case, and just because of that you lost someone who doesn’t usually bother himself commenting on blogs. Anyhow, your blog your call, just needed to get this off my chest because I felt bad. On a sidenote, do continue with the reviews, they are great, so are some of your own products such as Squeezomatic, Profit Canvas etc. Thanks. (hoping you would moderate this out, this is meant only for you and wouldn’t feel bad at all if this one’s not approved lol)
This is a product review blog. This is not a bash people and make personal attacks blog. We review, test, and talk about products here. Not about people. That is why I did not approve your previous comment.
My apologies then, misunderstood based on the two comments prior to mine, but the expectation is clear now. Anyhow all I meant to say was that Mehdi is not to be trusted based on one of his products I bought called Profit Penguin, the site which was not accessible within first few months, after which I contacted him, the Profit Penguin provided support e-mail and got no response (let me know if you need screenshots because I can get them for you). And the product was good by the way, I for one liked it. So it does matter whom you deal with. Once again, my apologies, will keep in mind of what you said going forward.
No worries 🙂