How sticky a social network is is largely determined by the size of the network as well as the quality of user experience. If Friendster could lose its edge due to spam, Facebook – essentially a better version of Friendster – should be extremely wary about the spam problem. Recently, there have been reports on Facebook Likejacking (e.g. here and here), which involves a user going to a website, doing anything but clicking a Like button and yet finding a “Like” post on her Facebook profile several seconds later. Basically, this is clickjacking applied to Facebook.

The change in the behavior of the Like button is extremely advantageous to malicious developers who want to engineer their own viral marketing campaign. While the Like button previously posted a one-line text update to one’s profile when clicked, it now posts a full-blown link sharing update with a thumbnail, description, etc. All a developer needs to do is to somehow get visitors to click on a Like button, which can be craftily hidden using CSS/Javascript code. The most common technique that we have witnessed so far is to get visitors to click on a video thumbnail with a play button.

Likejacking is problematic, because it defaces user profiles and reduces signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook. For Facebook to maintain its lead in social networking, it should continually ensure that the basics, such as a spam-free environment, are taken care of. One simple solution on how to tackle the problem is to leverage on the crowd to annotate particular posts as Likejacking spam, so that Facebook can ban certain URLs or prohibit certain websites from utilizing the Facebook Like plug-in. Instead Facebook took another route.

Have you experienced Likejacking? How do you think it will change Facebook?

Remember Friendster, that popular social network that came into the scene rather early and somehow got eclipsed by Myspace and Facebook along the way? The truth is that Friendster started declining in its own ways, thus paving the path for Myspace to really take over circa 2004. While technological scaling was an issue that precipitated the downfall of Friendster, the biggest issue was probably spam. Suddenly, you had unknown people writing nonsensical, commercially-driven Wall posts (I mean, testimonials) on your profile. Then, Friendster got smarter and plastered our profiles with ugly advertisements. The rest is history.

As marketers and brand owners, we probably believe, sometimes unduly, that our offering is always relevant to our target market and adds value to their social media existence. The problem is that the definition of spam is growing wider among social media users. Back then, any unsolicited message from an unknown person is considered spam. In the era of social networking, however, any content posted on social media is by default from a known source: our friends. Users are thus trained to be more discerning in assessing content, perhaps via closeness factors (“Maybe I should only care about content shared by my closest friends...”), or they simply ignore certain categories of content (links, products, promotions, etc.), regardless of who posted said content.

While the correct term to describe irrelevant content from a known source is noise, as in signal-to-noise ratio, not spam, the end result for marketers is the same: at the end of the day, nobody gives a damn about your offering. Sometimes more impressions on social media can mean increased visibility; sometimes more impressions on social media can create in the minds of consumers an irreversible association between the brand and spam. We ourselves certainly have to be mindful, because we partly help brands to create multiple impressions on Facebook, what we call increase “brand visibility” on Facebook. This is a point of caution that is not really given attention by a lot of marketers.

Facebook is also historically kinder to users than developers – remember not too long ago when our notification box was flooded with application notifications and users seemed to be threatening to leave? Facebook stopped developers from further harassing its users, and it did so firmly. If Facebook blocks commercial content-sharing in the future, marketers, brand owners, content creators, etc. will have some real problems penetrating the biggest and fastest-growing social media platform in the world.