Social Media and Spam

By Toivo Mvula

With many organisations jumping on the social media bandwagon, it will not be a surprise if social media lose its appeal sooner than anticipated.

Social networking sites, such as Myspace, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly being used by organisations to forward promotional messages to users, which can be quite annoying.

This is especially true with Facebook, which has an email/message component to it.
Logging onto your Facebook account and being greeted by a long list of messages from non-friends can be quite annoying.

Spam!

This is why email services have lost their popularity.
And social networking sites could be in danger of being destroyed by it.

With Twitter and RSS feeds for example, if you subscribe to a specific feed, spammers can easily tamper with those feeds to link you to sites that have nothing to do with the feeds you’re interested in.

You can now also find companies offering to hire tweeters to 'blast your link, ad or announcement to 100s of thousands of Twitter followers in an instant'.
We also have celebrities being paid to tweet about products.
That can definitely be regarded as spam.

Spam is already a problem with mobile phones and it is also becoming a problem in blogs.
If you log onto any popular blog, you’re likely to find a number of irrelevant comments with hyperlinks to promotional websites.