Facebook has been testing the Twitter like feature trending topics for a while and last week there were reports that the trending topics had been moved from the sidebar to the news feed. Yesterday I noticed an example of this for the topic “Philippines”.
One interesting aspect of this is that now Facebook is showing me two posts from people or pages that I don’t follow (the latter two of three seen below).
Do you think that BMW would give away a brand new car for free on Facebook through a simple “event”? Really? Of course they aren’t. If they would create a giveaway, it would be done professionally in a way that would maximize the return of the investment. Yet, thousands of people think that the simplest of hoaxes is the real deal and gladly accept invitations to a Facebook event, thinking they might actually win a new BMW M5. A new community page is attracting thousands of people to a “BMW M5 Giveaway 2013” (edit: link no longer works) who are encouraged to like the page and invite ten friends. More than 200,000 people have been invited so far. And without any doubt, this is a hoax from start to finish.
So if you care at all whether you are tricked into liking fake pages on social networks, maybe it is time you learn a few basic tricks on how to spot a fake Facebook competition of giveaway. It really doesn’t take a genius.
How to spot a fake giveaway on Facebook
First of all, is it reasonable that a large brand is giving away something really valueable for just a few likes in return? Probably not. The more “upscale” brand, the more quality we can expect in a marketing activity. This event could have been set up by a 10-year old.
Brands use multiple channels to communicate. Is this contest or giveaway communicated on any other place on the web? On the brand webpage or the brand Facebook page? If not, it’s probably fake.
Are you being asked to spam your friends with shares, likes or invites? Big brands try to play by the book. If you are asked to do something that could be considered spam or not following the guidelines of Facebook, it’s a hoax.
Does the page have credible branding? The BMW giveaway is a community page. A brand would not use a community page to promote a new product. And as you see below, the page doesn’t have a branded vanity URL, which you would expect a big brand to use (click on the images to see larger version).
Does the page have credible background information? If not, it’s not only a hoax, it’s a lazy hoax.
Did the page just launch or has it communicated trustworthy information for some time? If it is new and the giveaway is the very first post, you should think again.
Does the contest or giveaway have a professional touch? If there are several spelling errors in just a few paragraphs, it’s probably fake.
Does the information change on the event page? Are there copies? For a brief second, this giveaway page pointed to a second, similar page called BMW M5 Gift, with the same purpose and it has already attracted hundreds of people who in turn have invited 20,000 others. Once they got the first scam going, this could go on forever.
It’s amazing how easy it is to trick people into liking and sharing pages on social networks. We rarely take a minute to reflect on information that is shared by our friends, and that practice can be easily exploited. So in the future, think before you share.
Oh, and if I win, I would like a white BMW M5…
Update Nov 6: Both BMW pages and events are not gone from Facebook. But there are other similar scams that are still live, like this Audi R8 Giveaway. Also fake, of course.
Tonight is the first semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 in Malmö, Sweden. The contest is sure to spark an enormous amount of activity in social media and below you can find an extensive list of official Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Instagram accounts and more. Don’t forget to vote and tweet your support for your favourite songs.
Although Instagram has taken some measures to crack down on the increasing problem with spam, users are starting to become tired with the amount of fake accounts and comments about how to get more followers. In a response to the lack of action from Instagram, the community of instagrammers have decided to announce Dec 4 as the day many will turn their profiles to private. This protest is intended to send a message to Instagram that users are fed up with the situation, they just want to be able to share images without having to be approached by spammers.
Under the hashtag #onedaywithoutspam you can see protest images like these:
“Observing a day of protest against all the #spam on Dec. 4 by posting this and setting my profile to Private for 24 hours on that day. Please join in and hopefully #instagram will begin to take more serious steps to address this annoyance that is out of control.”
Whether this will have any effect on the spam problem remains to be seen.
Since Instagram has been predominantly a mobile app, its main advantage has not been that it drives a lot of traffic to other sites. So unlike for examplePinterest, it has been relatively free from spam until now. But the last few weeks, we have seen a major push from spammers that use hashtags to find images to publish spam comments on.
At the moment, I can easily scroll through the photos in my feed and find several spam comments, most seem to be on images that use hashtags. This is what happened in the comments to my latest photo, within a few minutes of posting the hashtags (one has since been deleted):
Comments like these are very easy to find. Here are some more posted on some of my friends’ images and on mine:
It is not very hard to determine that these accounts are completely fake. Many of them have fake followers with names like these:
Others have some 14,000 followers that when you click on them, simply don’t exist.
Users can delete and spam report comments and accounts, but some spammers are so active that there is a need for general spam filters that could automatically filter out comments about sites like “followsta gram” and “ig fame”. Spam is annoying for users and need to be taken care of. After all, there are many of us that love Instagram. Don’t let the spammers spoil our instafun.
I made a little experiment yesterday by trying to predict the outcome of the first Eurovision Song Contest semi-final. I used the number of Facebook likes to the country pages at Eurovision.tv and the number of views of the official videos. I was aware that it might not be the most accurate of predictions, since people can like and view a video but not vote for it due to the fact that you can’t vote for your own country and only countries competing in the semi-final could vote for the others.
Nevertheless, the overall rank I got was accurate to some degree. The countries I ranked 1-7 all got selected to the final. Then I failed with the others. The bottom three in my list, as expected, did not qualify. The tough part was the ones in the middle where the differences weren’t that big in the number of likes and views. Hungary, Moldova and Denmark eventually qualified.
The ranking based on Facebook likes was more accurate. The ten that qualified were all in my top 12 and I got all the top 7 in my list correct.
Rank: Facebook likes.
Russia Q
Cyprus Q
Greece Q
Romania Q
Ireland Q
Albania Q
Iceland Q
Finland
Moldova Q
Austria
Hungary Q
Denmark Q
Latvia
Israel
Montenegro
Switzerland
San Marino
Belgium
Let’s see if I can get even better results tomorrow, for semi-final 2 of the Eurovision Song Contest in Baku.