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.