Likejacking
Maximising number of likes on Facebook is important. It spreads the word about your product or service as all your friends and family are exposed to your like. In addition and any self respecting Facebook page wants as many likes as it can get, a page with only 3 likes isn’t very impressive. So what are the shortcuts to many likes? Enter likejacking, the term coined by Corey Ballou.
Likejacking is basically getting the user to click on a like button on site X while unknown to the user they are instead liking site Y. This is possible because of the simple way Facebook have implemented the like functionality. To add a like button a webmaster simply copies code from Facebook and changes the url to whatever they want it to be, no questions asked.
The next step up the ladder is to get users to like something without even realizing they are liking at all. An example of this is on xprojectmanagement.com. When visiting the site a welcome popup is displayed with a obvious ‘Close’ call to action. The interesting thing here is that if you click Close, you also like their Facebook page, wich is probably not what you thought you where doing. This would also seem to be in breach of Facebook’s promotion guidelines that state ‘You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter’.
This technique could also be spun further. Assuming someone had access to many web sites that toghether had 10 000 visitors a month (e.g. a shady web development shop), they could setup automatic liking of their own Facebook page for any visitor to their customers web pages. Hello 10 000 likes.
Better still, why not sell the 10 000 likes to the highest bidder? Sure we can make a Facebook page for you, and for some extra cash we can set you up with 10 000 likes in the first week. All they would need to do is configure the automatic like scripts on the sites the controlled to like the clients new Facebook page, which could be simply done centrally so that they could repeat the scam easily for other clients as well. Because the likes would be coming from many different and completely unrelated sites the bad guys would be harder to identify for Facebook’s wall spam filter. 10 000 likes is a lot of exposure because each like would be posted on the users walls and all their friends would see them.
Spamming and black hat SEO are common place, seems same thing is happening in the social media world, only a matter of time before we need to start removing spam from our news feeds?