If you actively post on Social Media, you should be warned that Comment Spamming is on the rise. While social media networks are doing their best to manage the spread of scams through their network, scammers are looking for loopholes, and comment spamming is the latest trend.
What is Comment Spamming?
Comment spamming happens through a post that you have made on your social media profile. Friends and others who like or follow you, begin to add comments to the post, and while all seems fine, somewhere along the line, one of those “not-so-close” friends adds a comment to another comment that someone else made, suggesting they like someone, or should check-out a link. While all seems innocent, consider it alarming especially when they do it multiple times, basically spamming your connections. While there are some instances where ‘True Friends” will share beneficial links, to supporting information; we have also seen this be tactics used by competing companies, trying to redirect your traffic to their site. This is often true for paid/promoted posts.
How to Protect Your Brand or Personal Identity from Fraudulent Comments
1) Choose Friends Wisely. There used to be a theory that encouraged people to “accept all friends to help your posts get seen”. While that was effective in the early days of social media, with data privacy concerns and protections on the rise, scammers are getting desperate and searching for more clever ways to be tricky and are creating more fraudulent social media profiles than ever before. The simple fix here is to choose friends wisely. Avoid accepting everyone, as a friend, and instead, make sure they’re someone you feel comfortable sharing personal information with before allowing them to be a friend.
2) Monitor Post Activity. We still want people to “Like” our brands or business pages but the important thing to be alert for is to closely monitor your comment activity on your account. We have seen comment bombing on posts of brands or personalities who have big followings and hundreds of comments on a post as it is easier to blend into the activity undetected. The fix here is to monitor comment activity closely and handle them right away to eliminate confusion on your brand.
3) See Something, Say Something. If the comment bomber comments on another comment, instead of your post itself, then your friend gets notified instead of you. Here again, active monitoring is essential. Brands are notified of comments made on their posts through the Business Manager software; but if there isn’t a dedicated person assigned to monitor that activity, it might take longer to notice creating greater concerns about your brand reputation being exposed. Alerting employees and friends about being comfortable with alerting the post owner of any redirecting link activity that looks spammy, is a more neighborly thing to do, and allows them to investigate and address any concerns.
4) Block and Report the Profiles. This is something both the post owner and their friends can do to protect themselves and help Facebook crack down on fraudulent profiles. Some people feel weird about this thinking who they are blocking is notified in some way, but they are not. You can simply click on their profile name to get to their profile page. Right-click on the three dots located below the friend’s message button, and select ‘Block’ from the drop-down menu. Confirm the pop-up message and be done! Additionally, you can right-click on the comment directly and ‘Report’ the post as SPAM to Facebook which will investigate the activity.