SMM (Social Media Marketing) is not about spamming at all. SMM is all about creating trust, authenticity and creating relationships. It is also about creating newsworthy and unique content on popular social media channels such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and various other Web 2.0 sites.
Spamming is no longer limited to splogs (spam blogs) and emails. There are many people online trying to exploit SMM by using various different spamming methods. Find a couple of social media spamming methods below that are hurting the Web 2.0 sphere.
Common Spam SMM methods
Twitter spamming: This is mostly called follow spam. This mostly affects Twitter and various other micro blogging communities and services. This is also one of the most used spamming methods on Twitter where you can follow a huge number of people for the general purpose of getting them to follow you back.
Splogs (Spam Blogs): These are usually automated blogs that gathers search engine results using feeds from various online services such as Google Alerts. Some splogs can also aggregate blog feeds from popular other niche blogs. These splogs are mostly used to promote affiliated sites or to generate money with advertisements. This is also called autoblogging.
Comment Spam: This is also quite a commen spamming method where comments are placed on blogs with the sole objective to get links back to the spammer’s website. Some comments can include discount prescription drugs, advertisements for weight loss or even links to pornography websites. One of the most used spam comments that we receive on this blog is “Excellent blog post. Keep up the good work”.
Spam messages: This involves the sending of unwanted and direct ads or commercial messages on various social networking channels. Marketers usually targets a certain demographic to send these unsolicited messages to. This is a major problem on Facebook.
Social Bookmarking Spam: This is usually done with automated services and applications that will create “fake profiles” to promote a particular site. These automated applications and services creates social bookmarking links on popular channels such as Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon.
Profile Spamming: This is another common spamming method where profiles are setup on popular social networking sites where the sole purpose is to create links back to a particular website and not for contributing to that community.