Facebook marketing is generally fun! We have a process by which we make sure that our clients get great exposure and connect with the most people and companies possible. That having been said, there are A LOT of application scams and viruses so tread carefully if you are using Facebook for business!
DO NOT Play Games On Facebook
Farmville, Mafia Wars and other Facebook games may seem like a super-fun way to while a couple of minutes away during the day. Because they are socially tied in, when you harvest a crop or shoot a bad guy, it shows up on your friends (and clients’) walls. Imagine them, sitting and waiting for a vital email from you and the next thing they see is that got a high score on bejeweled! Now, I am sure that you were playing while you were eating lunch or returning calls or any of the million other things that you have to do to stay alive in a day BUT you don’t have to broadcast that to everyone who is connected to you on Facebook! While this is not actually a virus or a scam, I don’t think that gaming has any place on Facebook for a business professional!
Stik Facebook Spam
Stik is a Facebook App that asks for peer recommendations and then wants to spam your friend’s walls with all kinds of useless information. We work with LOTS of Realtors who love to push these kinds of things out but HONESTLY, it is spam and will get you unfriended faster than you can shake a stick! Here is a great post about “Social Media SPAM – Is Stik.com good for your facebook profile?” that says it better than I ever could!
You Are In This Picture Facebook Scams
Any time you get a notification from a friend that says “you look wonderful in this picture” or “OMG, did you see what you did on this video”, step lightly! If they require you to “allow” an app to access your account to see what horrible fate has befallen your image, DO NOT CLICK ALLOW!!! It is a spammer app that will then send that same message to everyone on your friends list.
Check Out Who Visited Your Profile Scams
This is a big one I get almost every day! There is NOT a way to see who has simply typed your name into the search bar to look you up. When you see this message, it means that one of your friends got fooled and a spyware or virus app wants to bother all YOUR friends now too. DO NOT CLICK ALLOW – do you see a theme here people, if you have to click allow to see something, it is one that you DO NOT want to let into your FB world!
Rules Of Thumb For Avoiding Being A Facebook Spammer
The worst part of being fooled into clicking some of these Facebook malware programs is that it makes YOU look like you are a spammer! Whether you intended to or not, you put your friends on the spammers radar by randomly clicking things that you should know better than to click! Here are some good rules of thumb to avoid being taken in:
If it seems to good to be true, it is! Social media is no different than anywhere else. NO ONE is going to give you an iPad for free OR get you 10,000 fans overnight or any of the other wild things out there. Have some common sense and think to yourself, does this make sense?
Generally people are nice on Facebook. Because Facebook has a self monitoring feature of letting people unfriend you if you are a jerk, rarely will anyone send you a message that says someone else posted a picture or a video of you looking like a fool. These types of scare tactics prey on our insecurities but are mostly imaginary. What horrible things you think are happen on FB (almost like High School) mostly aren’t! Just keep track of what you are tagged and posted in and you will be fine (if they want you to hit “allow” to see it first, altogether now, DO NOT CLICK THE LINK!)
If it seems totally self serving, it probably is. Stik is totally PUSH marketing that is telling people that you are in business and they better damn well listen to you. Social media is not like that, it is more around the corner marketing and NO ONE likes having your marketing message on their wall, ESPECIALLY if you can not control where it goes!
General Information About Facebook Scams
Facebooks Official Word On Application Spam – Somewhat Boiler-platey from the horse’s mouth
Rogue Facebook apps steal log-in data, send spam – A really good visual post about how they can even steal your login info!
Facebook Spam Apps Still Alive and Well – As of December over 60,000 people had fallen for the “See Who Visited Your Profile” scam and still it rolls on (REALLY? Why can’t Facebook shut this thing down?!?!?!)
A Detailed Analysis Report about Facebook Spam Applications and How to protect your Facebook Account from those – REALLY good post about how these scams technically work!
I KNOW, there are probably a hundred different privacy settings that you can use to try to avoid these slimey spammers, but at the end of the day, using your common sense will do more to help your Facebook Marketing avoid application scams and viruses than any privacy settings can ever do. Stop clicking random strange things and you should generally be fine!
Article Source: http://marketingartfully.com/2011/05/11/facebook-marketing-application-scams-and-viruses/
Facebook marketing is generally fun! We have a process by which we make sure that our clients get great exposure and connect with the most people and companies possible. That having been said, there are A LOT of application scams and viruses so tread carefully if you are using Facebook for business!
0 comments:
Post a Comment