

How to Spam your Facebook Friends for a Week - aliston
http://www.alexmedearis.com/how-to-spam-your-facebook-friends-for-a-week/

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resu_nimda
I've been noticing these a lot recently, and I think the algorithm needs a lot
of work because these companies can essentially be paying to damage their
brands. When I see "So-and-so likes X" at the top of my feed every day, I get
annoyed, and I instinctively direct my ire at the advertiser (or worse, my
friend) rather than Facebook. I've seen a bunch of comments like "why do you
keep posting this shit," and the reply is of course "I don't know, I'm not
doing anything!"

I mean, even the first time I see one of those ads, the whole thing just rings
cheap, and I dislike that my friends (and possibly myself) are unwittingly
participating in these ad campaigns. It really doesn't seem like effective
marketing (but I'm no guru, maybe getting the impressions turns out to
outweigh the annoyance?).

I wish this article had continued to the conclusion of "what if I put very
negative or outright offensive text in my sharing of this page, which could
then be propagated as an ad?"

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gdubs
This. I recently paid a small amount to advertise my app (promoted post) on
Facebook and while I was pleased at the number of likes, comments and
impressions, there were a disproportionate number of comments yelling in all
caps for me to stop spamming their newsfeed.

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josephlord
The number may have been high but I'm sure there are some that may think even
100% yelling in such a way may be proportionate.

If you want to persuade Facebook not to spam the newsfeed making it
unattractive to advertisers is the way to do it.

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cargo8
The thing is, despite it being "pretty good business" it is not what most
people _want_ from Facebook. Facebook's "good business" practices are
basically conflicting (inverse relationship) with the quality and usefulness
of the product from the user's perspective.

That is the big difference and why people are complaining that Facebook is too
much noise, because everyone goes there just to see what their friends are up
to - not what they just bought on amazon.

The perfect product is one where the company's monetary interests are aligned
with the user's experience. By offering the user something they want, they
mutually benefit and make money. That is just not the case, at least for what
I personally want from Facebook.

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arbuge
As I understand it, for this to work, Amazon (to use the author's example)
would have to be paying Facebook specifically to show these domain sponsored
stories. The author is essentially leveraging off Amazon's advertising budget,
correct?

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Farox
Yup, you piggy back your message/ad on someone else's payed ads

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phwd
This is pretty much the same method a user can use to provide a negative
comment using the Like Button comment feature on a company, though actually a
lot worse and a bit more annoying. This also appears in "X is posting about Y"
which I wrote about a while back [1], grinds my gears really.

The ad push is more aggressive than I am comfortable with

On the flip side, because how these sponsored stories/posts work, if you are
able to chain together an exploit with either click-jacking or otherwise you
can get a pretty decent worm [2] going using their very own sponsored stories
feature against them.

[1]: [http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/tupac-is-posting-
about-...](http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/tupac-is-posting-about-lil-
wayne-sponsored-stories-evolved/) [2]:
<http://philippeharewood.com/facebook/make-it-red-and-viral/>

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Sven7
"against them"?

They would get paid either way.

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RexM
So you could send out amazon links to products with your referral id, have
amazon pay facebook to pin it to the top of people's news feeds, and cash in
if anyone buys something from amazon after visiting your link? :)

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ryandvm
I would be very surprised if Facebook doesn't strip the referral out and
replace it with their own.

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arbuge
Well, if so, you could just use a link shortener to hide the tag from FB...

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kgermino
Wouldn't that also have to hide the Amazon-ness of it to work? (Meaning that
FB wouldn't make it a promoted post)

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arbuge
Aye. I need to stop posting before having my coffee...

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maneesh
Woah that's my facebook post! About Daily Rituals.

My only regret in life is that I didn't use an affiliate link.

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btbuildem
I wonder if this still works if you include an URL in the description / post
text..

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Buzaga
this is awesome, does this work with sponsored stories too?

