The following is an excerpt from Yahoo! NewsYahoo! | October 24, 2012 |
Picture on Left (Yahoo! News – ‘Viral’ links such as this do nothing – and are just used to harvest ‘Likes’ to be sold on (Image: Facebook)
Facebook users who’ve clicked viral links such as ‘Click This if You Hate Cancer’ could be in for a nasty surprise.
The links – and others such as ‘click this picture and see what happens’ do nothing except make cyber-scammers rich.
Once the pages have collected huge numbers of ‘Likes’, they are then sold, for cash, to other businesses who use them to make their page appear popular.
A blog post by Daylan Pearce, a search-engine expert at Next Digital in Melbourne, explains how the nonsense posts scam works – and shows how the pages are sold on.
[Related: How 'sexy' photos on social networks are stolen and reused ]
The posts – images with captions such as ‘Like if you can see the tiger,’ or ‘Comment and see what happens’ are used to build ‘Likes’ and ‘Comments’ for pages.
Once a page has collected thousands of likes and comments, it will appear higher in people’s News Feeds on Facebook – ‘Likes’ are the ‘currency’ of the site, as it were.
Pages with 100,000 likes can be sold for $200, according to adverts unearthed by Pearce.
Pearce explains in a blog post, ‘The Facebook Like algorithm is Facebook’s way of dictating if content is of any value to users. The more likes/shares/comments it gets, the more exposure to certain people it, and the profile it belongs to, will get both short term and long term.
‘All these metrics contribute to a users ‘edge rank’ – the score your profile is given that dictates how your page interacts with other profiles on Facebook. ‘
To read more visit: Yahoo!
