A new way to spam competitions on facebook?
 

I have one facebook friend who is constantly spamming her status in order to win competitions. The main point seems to be to get people to the company's page, and "like" it. She's basically begging all of her FB friends to look at something so she might win a prize.

Another method used is to ask participants to tag themselves in a picture, which usually has ad copy, so it shows up in everyone's news feeds, and also the participants albums.

Recently I've seen an ingenious but even more annoying method of badgering FB friends... write an app that autonomously posts to their news feed 2 or 3 times a day. No need to keep egging on participants to spam their friends via their status, it's all done automatically from within the app, since it has posting privileges.

I've only seen one so far. Now imagine what happens when someone has 5, or 10, of these apps installed, and they're each posting a couple of updates per day that all of their friends have to see... :helpme

I wonder if this is even permitted, since it's just spamming a company, not actually providing any useful update content...

When is the last time you saw "useful update content" on Facebook? Ever?

Yeah, I know, it's all relative. :thumbsup

But I mean it just spams exactly the same text every time, rather than being triggered by a specific action, eg "Blah Blah just completed a level in StupidGenericGame." It's the only time I can remember seeing something that repeatedly posted exactly the same content at a relatively high frequency.

time to make a new bot :)

I'm pretty sure that's against Facebooks ToS for fan pages...

the big scam I noticed that is too popular is a site will have a thumbnail for a video which is usually a very enticing image that would get people curious, but the catch is you have to install the app to watch it, and the app spams to the wall that "so and so" watched a video on __________ , with the thumbnail of the video... so that person's friends would all see it and probably many will want to watch it too so they install the app and it spreads like wildfire from there

I think facebook is doomed, in 5 years many that go on there a lot now will not go on there much anymore, many will delete their profiles wanting to distance themselves from the people or crap they are doing now, etc.

I noticed that one of my friends was starting to post utterly stupid things - links to news that wasn't really interesting. After a month of this... I cut him off and no longer see his posts. Fuck that.

That was probably frictionless browsing, which automatically posts a link when your friend views the article. You see updates about EVERYTHING he reads, not just personally selected links to articles he's decided are interesting.

Some sites require you to install an app to read the article, which enables frictionless browsing. Given that many people just click "OK" without really thinking he may not have even been aware that all his article reading activity was being posted to his news feed.

I get a kick out of that sometimes when you see some friend that is married and it posts an update saying something like "joe _____ just watched the video "Kate Upton bikini dance" ..... and he probably has no idea that the video site is broadcasting that fact to everyone he knows on facebook :1orglaugh