Your company is a social media star. On Facebook, you have 10,000 fans. On Twitter, 7,500 followers. You’re ‘listening’ and ‘engaging’ on a regular basis.
But are you as socially successful as you think?
According to Impermium, a startup dedicated to curbing spam on social networks, social networks may not be as social as you think they are, which in turn means you may be overestimating your popularity on the social web.
In looking at more than 90m users and 100m pieces of user-generated content from its client base, which includes Posterous and Bebo, Impermium found that up to 40% of public accounts on social networks it works with are fake accounts set up by spammers and scamsters. Not surprisingly, according to Impermium, the juicier the target, the higher the ‘fake’ figure.
The problem is significant. As detailed by TechCrunch:
Impermium also found that so-called ‘sleeper cells’ of social web abuse are growing fast. One if its customers experienced an attack of 30,000 fraudulent new accounts in one hour. Those accounts then posted 475,000 malicious messages to legitimate community members.
Social spam is not new, of course. But it does appear to be more prominent today, and it’s getting more sophisticated as spammers see more opportunities to profit in the channel.
While Impermium doesn’t work with Facebook and Twitter, it seems logical to assume that, as Impermium suggests, spammers target the biggest fish. If you use Twitter, for instance, you’re almost certainly familiar with social spam.Click here to read the full article