Those of you that are on Facebook will no doubt have seen your friends and family posting all kinds of stupid things. Quite often it’ll be a silly competition such as “Name a band that doesn’t have an A in their name – it’s harder than you think”.
Of course it isn’t hard at all – there are millions of bands without the letter A in their name, but what these competitions generate is a lot of activity. They’ll often generate hundreds of thousands of comments.Instead of the question you might see a photo, with instructions like “Click on the photo, post a comment, see what happens”. Of course, nothing happens. Another variation involves liking a page and sharing a photo, with the promise that you might win something valuable. Quite often it’ll be a photo of iPhones or iPads, but I’ve also seen a trend towards expensive shoes and handbags. Sometimes the name of the account running the competition will be something that looks quite genuine too.
I’m sure that most people probably realise that it might be a scam, but think “What the heck, it isn’t doing any harm, and there’s always the slightest chance that I might actually win something”.
Actually, in both of these instances you are doing harm. For starters you’re sharing this rubbish with your friends, so likely to be luring them into it too, but mainly because you’re helping scammers. The business model behind these competitions is that they are looking to get as many likes or comments as possible, and that’s all. There are no prizes. You’re never going to win an iPhone, or a pair of Ugg boots.
What all of these scams are about is getting as comments and in particular as many likes as possible. Facebook uses an algorithm called edge rank for its news feed optimisation. A bit like Google with its page rank, edge rank is used to prioritise how often things appear in peoples’ Facebook feeds. Pages with lots of likes and comments get a much higher edge rank, which is why so much of this guff shows up in your news feed!
But where’s the business model? Well, a page with hundreds of thousands of likes is a very valuable commodity. Lots of brands, large and small, are starting to venture into social media. The first thing they learn is that it can take months or even years to build up an online community. As a result, many are prepared to buy a pre-built community from a scammer (although of course, being novices, they are probably unaware of the scam element).
Someone wanting a quick win (it might even be another scammer!) buys the page and they’ve instantly got a huge following, lots of likes and comments, and a long established edge rank capable of pushing out updates to hundreds of thousands of Facebook users. It’s a marketing manager’s dream!
To be fair to Facebook, it has tried to tighten this whole area up slightly – it used to be that the scammer would change the name of the page when they sold it, to reflect the new owner. A while back Facebook changed the rules so that you couldn’t change the name of a page after it had received more than 200 likes. But as I mentioned above, the scammers get around this by using fairly official looking names in the first place.
I must admit I tend to get annoyed when I see friends and family taking part in these scams – especially those that really ought to know better. The other day I even saw a friend with a senior position in IT security sharing a ‘Win an iPad’ photo. But I guess that until someone has explained what the scam is, and how it works, it’s hard to see what problems it might cause.
A good rule of thumb is to look for terms and conditions – any genuine competition will have them, but these scams usually don’t. Also look for things like spelling mistakes and bad grammar – you’ll often find these in the scam postings, whereas any genuine competition from a large brand will have been through several stages of proof reading.
The best advice is to listen to granny. She may not be on Facebook, but your gran’s old ‘if it looks too good to be true it probably is” adage is as true today as it has ever been, and is especially important in the social media world.
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