Most people equate spam to unsolicited email, but spam on the Internet comes in all forms. Whenever you see an off-topic comment in a forum, on a blog, or just about anywhere else, it's also a form of spam.
Social networks generate another kind of spam that makes social networking undesirable for a lot of people (including me).
Social Networks in General
There's nothing wrong with getting involved with social networks. The majority of the Internet population does one primary thing very well: Kill time. Social networks are incredible time sinks. Once you get involved with one or more, your idle time disappears rapidly.
Social networking is also a good way to build relationships with people you might not otherwise ever come into contact with. Some of my best relationships are with people I met through social networking. That was before I practically gave up on social networking. There's no good ROI (return on investment) for most of the time spent on social networks and I'm much better at building relationships without them.
Social Bookmarking Sites
While I can't recommend getting involved with most social networks, I CAN recommend getting involved with social bookmarking sites. It takes very little time to bookmark a site or page. In most cases, it's automated to some degree — you just click on a link or a button.
Social bookmarking sites are a great way to build links to other sites and generate traffic for them. Bookmarking other sites on a regular basis will encourage other people to link to your sites and thus generate traffic for you. This is something that takes regularity and practice. It isn't something that works overnight.
Specific Social Networking Sites
There are some social networking sites I used to stay involved with, but no longer do. The sites have incorporated features that have become nothing more than spam features.
Digg instituted the shout feature some time ago. Once I saw that I was getting hundreds of "shouts" per day to digg someone's post, I stopped going there. Every once in awhile, I'll return and see that I have thousands of shouts to act on if I so desire. I don't desire.
I used to like StumbleUpon (SU). I don't anymore and the reason is that there are some people who seem to think that I want to stumble each and every page they create. Recently SU added an email feature to go along with the toolbar notifications. It just makes things worse. It's getting so bad that I'm almost ready to uninstall the toolbar.
The shout features of the social networking sites are what drives me away from them. BlogCatalog is another such site. Every time I look, I have shouts in the sidebar saying something that equates to "come look at my page and help me out". It's sickening.
No Time for Social Networking
In the end, the main reason I'm not actively involved in any particular social network is because I don't have the time. Wading through the spam doesn't help matters at all and actually keeps me from wanting to return to any of them.
I don't know if you'd call it spam or not, but the hundreds of "friend requests" from people I've never even heard of could be considered another form of spam. I mean, come on! I don't know you. I haven't even heard of you in passing and you want me to be your friend?
Don't get me started on Twitter. As a concept, it's pretty good. In reality, it's not very good at all unless you're socially active. Every so often, I try to go back and get involved with it and end up quitting after a day. I'm getting spammed by Tweeters too!
I think every social network suffers from a glut of social network spammers at one time or another. The only social networks that don't have them are the ones that are new or haven't caught on yet.
Okay, it may sound like I don't like social networking sites. It's actually quite the opposite. I like them. I just don't have the time to de-spamify them enough to make my time being involved with them something worthwhile.
(Image source: Shrunken No-Spam logo at flickr)
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This article is published as: Social Networking Spam is One Reason NOT to Get Involved
too much spam can be penalized by search engines. that is extremely true. alot of seo-ers use that to their advantage, which ads to the problem.
seo companies use millions of spammy links to their SERP competitors in order to devalue the competitions sites,which in turn raises the rankings of their site.
My latest blog post: Back Links Required to Achieve a Certain Google PageRank
This is unfortunate but true. The only real way to prevent it is to disallow comments completely.
As long as the internet runs, Spamming will not diminish. But I admit, usually see a lot of spams across the social network sites especially twitter..
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