Spam on Facebook

I recently helped launch a Facebook page for the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California (HBSA/NC), the San Francisco Bay Area alumni organization for HBS. Unlike brand fan pages, this page has a limited audience—HBS alumni in the Bay Area—a potential fan base of perhaps ten thousand.

But like any brand, HBSANC was concerned about potential abuse when setting up a Facebook page.

Sure enough, as soon as we launched, we experienced two kinds of spam.

Soft Spam

The first was what I consider “soft spam”.

Phil Terry is, in fact, an HBS alumn—a fact I could only determine after a cross-reference between the HBS alumni directory and LinkedIn. However, he’s still not part of our target audience because he’s located in New York. He’s trolling Facebook to pick up consulting work. Not a bad strategy in these lean times.

I could have deleted Phil’s comment, but when you delete comments like Phil’s on a regular basis, people start to wonder what else you’re editing. So instead, I decided to reply and turn his inquiry into a little advertisement of my own.

This lets Phil (and anyone else who visits the page for the same reasons) know where we stand on our Facebook consulting needs.

Real Spam

With only 38 fans signed up, I spent a little time looking at who had become a fan. Some were friends I knew personally, others not. I could look up the names in the HBS alumni directory to verify that they were, indeed, HBS alumni. Sure enough, with only 38 fans, we already had 3 imposters.

What was so interesting, though, was that these 3 fans had already been disabled by Facebook. When I linked through to their profiles, there was nothing there except for the name. The account had been deleted.

It’s nice to know that Facebook is out there protecting us from spammers. In fact, aggressive deletion of spammers is, I believe, one of the reasons Facebook has grown so much. People feel safe here. Let’s hope that protection continues!

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