Facebook spammers pulling in $200 million

By Rebecca Davis

Facebook spammers are ahead of the junk crowd. Just a few years ago posting comments at respected websites (i.e. Huffington Post, Forbes, New York Times) was the rage. Try to sound like you really cared about the content of an article as you posted your remarks (being certain to add a link back to your own website) and you might gain two to five visitors.

Facebook spammers aren’t playing around
It was time consuming. People operating search engines like Google and Bing also caught on the same way they caught on to article and blog posts keyword stuffing. You’d have to try new tactics if you’d want your business to get into the minds of larger numbers of people. After all, that’s what marketing it all about . . . getting into the heads of as many people as possible.


Now small business owners are turning to link building to gain higher search engine rankings and hopefully gain more customer sales. This strategy often comes in the form of ghost writing, where freelance writers pen articles for company owners then guest publish them on high ranking websites. Yes. It’s similar to the comments strategy, just longer content and, of course, it always helps to throw in pictures.

But who would have thought that posting third party links on Facebook fan pages would get spammers $200 million a year? Italian security researchers unearthed the tactic after examining thousands of Facebook posts, by legitimate folks and Facebook spammers. “Andrea Stroppa and Carlo De Micheli, the leaders of the group, analysed pages across the network, and identified spam through the use of phrases such as “Hey click here for a free iPhone” followed by links to sites outside the network,” according to the Guardian.

To attract unsuspecting users, the spammers may even set up fake Facebook fan pages. Although they probably don’t want to, Google can also make out. “About 9% of the pages that users were directed to by spammers instead use Google’s AdSense – meaning that Google inadvertently gets a cut from the money being made by the buyers of spam services.”

Furthermore, “The spam posters get paid an average of $13 per post, for pages that have around 30,000 fans, up to an average of $58 to post on pages with more than 100,000 fans,” De Micheli told the Guardian. “If we consider these two as extremes, the pages we analysed generate a revenue of 18,000 posts per day, times the revenue per post – ranging from $13 to $58 – 365 days a year.”


The more followers fan pages have, the more at risk they might be of attracting these types of Facebook spammers. The drive? Money. It’s going to take more watchfulness from Facebook officials to curb the trend and prevent other tactics from taking its place. It’s also going to take people speaking up, alerting Facebook about unscrupulous practices it’s allowing certain users to repeatedly engage in.

If you enjoyed or benefited from this article, share it with others by clicking the Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Share buttons below. You bet! We appreciate it!

Click the “Subscribe” button at the side or bottom of this post so you can always be the very first person to receive our updates!

Get Your Copy of Love Pour Over Me at http://www.amazon.com/Love-Pour-Over-Me-ebook/dp/B007MC0Z2C

Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/28/facebook-spam-202-million-italian-research (The Guardian)