Do they think we are idiots?
As part of my many daily tasks, I run and manage the Facebook page for Teach My Kids. Often, we get requests from other companies for reciprocal likes, we politely decline as it serves no purpose to increase likes with people who will never make use of your content or engage with other users. I received one today which didn’t feel right.
I clicked on the profile to see which company she represented, and noticed that she had next to no profile, no friends etc which seemed odd. Now this was the clever bit, thanks to google, I uploaded the profile pic to Google Images and see if it could find who they were, and alas, it turned out to be a cropped photo from a news article. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/22/britains-most-identical-t_n_621483.html#s104178 This is bizarre, why would anyone, ANYONE i say, pay a company who would approach you using an empty facebook account, purely setup to spam and use a photo lifted off the internet. It smacks of dodgy. This is unfortunately happening far too often, I regularly see this with twitter accounts, where fake accounts are used to snare people into hiring out their services. It’s not a new problem, far from it, I receive, almost daily, emails from randomly generated names offering PAGE ONE SEO services. The emails are cleverly crafted to avoid spam filtering, as they seem to change their name and company name often enough, rendering already created spam filters useless. Are companies hiring these people to help with their SEO, or social media. I hope not, but as their spamming efforts continue, I can only think that it must be working.