Five things that can get you labeled as a Facebook spammer

With over 400 million active users on Facebook, you know there’s a lot of spamming going on. A lot of Facebook spammers are looking for that small percentage of people who will fall for whatever sales pitch they put out. There are others though, who are making a real effort to use Facebook to market their business, make friends, or just learn their way around the most popular social networking website around. Unfortunately, they may not be aware of the fact that what they’re doing is getting them labeled as a Facebook spammer by the very people they’re trying to reach out to.

These five Facebook activities just might get you a big bad spammer label. If you’re guilty of any of them, you might want to rethink your Facebook strategy.

1. Your only activity is Friends, Groups, and Pages

Chances are, you’re trying to build up your friends list so you can blast people with your message – whatever that might be. As a result, the majority of the updates on your profile looks like this:

• Joe and Mary are now friends
• Joe and Andy are now friends
• Joe joined the group We be spammers
• Joe and Frank are now friends
• Joe likes Marketers and Spammers
• Joe and Michael are now friends
• Joe likes I Love Spam!
• Joe and Susan are now friends
• Joe likes I’m going to sell you all sorts of stuff
• Joe and Angela are now friends
• Joe and Steven are now friends
• . . . and the list goes on . . .

2. You should LIKE THIS!

You’re constantly sending page suggestions to all your friends – sometimes for the same pages over and over again. It’s fine to send a suggestion now and then, but when you send your friends suggestions constantly they’re likely to get tired of it.

3. You send friend requests to people you have absolutely no connection with.

You send a friend request to somebody you don’t know, and have no common friends. When the person you want to be friends with sends a message back asking if you know each other, you either don’t respond or you send a snotty reply.

If you really want to be friends with someone you don’t know, and have a good reason for wanting to do so, include a short note with the friend request. Just click the “add a personal message” and let the person know why you’re sending the friend request.

4. Using other Fan Pages and Groups to sell your stuff

You join Facebook Groups and Like Facebook Pages so you can post messages about your business. Recently someone became a fan of the PetsitUSA Fan Page and promptly posted a message that said

“PetsitUSA is now a favorite page of @my-facebook-page. Please make our page a favorite of yours.”

When I went to the Facebook Fan Page mentioned, I saw about 40 favorite fan pages listed, and each one of them had the very same message posted that was posted on the PetsitUSA Fan Page. Spammer.

5. It’s all about YOU! YOU! YOU!

Everything on your business page is all about you or your business. “Buy this!” “Look at me!” “Our company is wonderful!” Blah … blah . . . blah . . .

Sure, we all know Fan Pages are quite often set up to help sell a product or service, but rather than giving a constant sales pitch, interact with the people who like your page. Remember, it’s called social media for a reason.

Doing some of these things may seem like the right thing to do to get business, but think about how you feel when someone is constantly trying to sell you something. It gets old real fast and tends to backfire! There are lots of people who will go out of their way to avoid companies that are use the “in your face” approach to selling their products or services.