Facebook becoming Brand Spam
Oct 27
As social media continues to grow, businesses are slowly starting to gravitate towards it with their marketing promotions. In the past few months, we’ve seen a deluge of SMEs, multinationals, and freelancers take to social networks like Facebook and Friendster via fan profiles/pages, advertising, and even through direct messages and chatting. A year ago, the most popular item on your status stream would be quizzes and actual updates. For the past few weeks more and more brands are starting to take space in the status stream. I have a feeling that the ratio of brand spam versus actual friend updates will grow tremendously in the coming months, especially with the elections just around the corner.
Brand Spam
Brand Spam is basically unsolicited and intrusive messages being forced on you. Most social networks can’t stop companies and businesses from creating profiles and adding other users. As a user, we should all be cautious on which group, fan page, or friend we add because we may open ourselves up to brand spam. The best example here would be the antics of some of the members of the Create Abundance group wherein they create fan profiles of prominent figures and organizations so that they can send spams about their activities.
Facebook Engine Optimization (FEO)
With Facebook’s new feed system, users will see news items that have the most comments/likes/etc. Obviously the more comments/likes, the more people will read it because it’s at the top of the feed list. Social Networks have the potential to drive INSANE amounts of traffic, and I’m speaking from experience here. Given that they have the capability to deliver views, I’m actually afraid that companies will start doing the following:
- create a hundred accounts on FB
- add them all to their main business profile
- business profile does a status update/post
- they have their 10000+ accounts like it/comment/etc.
- this propels the status message at the top of the feed list
Of course this won’t work if you don’t add them on your network. 
So my advice for everyone is to be cautious when it comes to social media. Don’t fall victim to unscrupulous groups and individuals who just want to invade your inbox and status streams.
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This is some good advice. I always try to be careful about who I ad.
We’ve all seen how Friendster went to the dogs. Facebook is becoming old really fast, just like how Friendster became obsolete and useless because of the spam.
In retrospect though, I think for every 1 spam on Facebook, there are 1,000 spam on Friendster.
Actually, what will separate the men from the boys in SNS and digital media marketing is: IF their profile page(s) do provide ANY VALUE