The Increasing Importance of Social Networking and Blog Spam

Social networking sites are great. From everyones perspective, they’re fantastic. Take Digg for example, one of the most original of its kind and certainly the most popular. Basically, it’s a user-driven news website where users submit news articles from all over the Web and other users vote on which is good and which isn’t. It’s a great system that gives credit to some quality writing and journalism in the form of website traffic and inbound links (from an SEO point-of-view, at least). Submitting an article and it being made ‘popular’ isn’t as easy as it sounds – bearing in mind there are thousands of users submitting thousands of articles every day; the most likely outcome is that your submission will get lost in the crowd. Compare it to shouting "Bon Jovi are great!" at a Bon Jovi concert and you’ll see what I mean.

So what happens to the submissions that make it? For every user that submits a front-page article, there are 20,000 other users reading it. That’s huge. 20,000 visitors in the space of a few hours. If your web server can handle the traffic, you’re likely to see your advertising revenue shoot up and hundreds of new backlinks every day for a week. So like I said, social networking is great for everyone. It’s great for the users who get top quality news articles every day. It’s great for the user who sees their own online reputation surge. It’s great for the website who published the article in the first place, and it’s great for advertisers who see an increase in revenue. But it’s also great for spammers.

Spammers love social networking just as much as everyone else. If they can overcome the challenge of disguising themselves as quality content, which they regularly do, they can see the same influx as everyone else. But how does it affect a website that specifically has a button for users to ‘bury spam’? Simple, they do what every other user does by searching the web for quality articles and—instead of submitting

Related Posts

1. Social Networking can be a Disappointment for Advertisers
2. Social Networking, What it means for you and your business?
3. Social Media Goes Mobile
4. The Never Ending Frieding Project-Social Media Marketing Study
5. Is social media getting more mainstream?
6. Getting Started With Social Media Bookmarking
7. Social Media – who’s next?
8. Social Media – The Stats Are In!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 4:29 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.