They are known as spammers and Black Hats of Social Media Marketing. But in fact they are just wolves, Social Media Wolves being hungry, ruthless and highly aggressive animals.

They are constantly stalking Social Media for more new gains. The pursuit of easy profit develops in different ways: through Internet traffic, batch getting of links with keywords, by selling cheap Rolex imitations or by tricks with sending fee-paying SMS.

They are hated by all cyberspace, but despite all that, social media wolves continue attacking social media and its users.

So below are given top ten “black” techniques allowing wolves to subsist.

1. «False» friends on Facebook
Have you ever come up against a situation where a very cute but absolutely unknown to you girl asked to add her on your friend list? The caption to her friendship proposal ran something like: “You are a funny guy! Let us have a talk!” Unfortunately, I have to deject your spirit – you have just faced one of the social media wolves.

The targets pursuit by the wolves willing to make friends with you often vary. Most probably they are gathering a vast friends base (which may amount to dozens thousands of users) to send them advertising messages or invitations to join the promoted communities. But, probably, they do it just to decoy you to the outside website using profile links like: “My nude shots”.

Please, do not stuff your head with the trifles like why namely you were chosen out of all other users: social media wolves do not bother themselves with making such choices manually, they just use special scripts by means of which friendship proposals are being automatically sent either to all in a row or to users meeting certain criteria (for example, to users living in a certain city or preferring a certain kind of music).

Do not swallow the bait thrown to you by social media wolves only seemingly willing to make friends with you. Remember that wolves do not have any friends.

2. The use of fake celebrity profiles
Today there are 136 Tom Cruises, more than 500 George Bushes, 27 Britney Spearses and more than 700 Bin Ladens on Facebook. Try to guess whose work it is! Social media wolves are undoubtedly responsible for all such fake user profiles.

To get more information on how and for which purposes celebrity profiles are used I decided to seek answers for my questions from one of the exemplary representative of social media wolves. Well, at this point I should confess that seeking for such a person turned out to be not so easy task (these guys show a strong dislike for publicity), but, finally, thanks to my profound acquaintances I got it.

“There is nothing less arduous than promoting celebrity profiles – usually it is enough to add in your friend list first thousand of personalities and after it people start overloading you with their friendship proposals. Sometimes, the quality of such proposals amounts up to several thousands a day because everybody eagers to have MC Hammer and Richard Ashcroft on his/her friend list.

Such greatly enlarged friend lists are used in a variety of ways. Enquiries for sending fee-paying SMS is, perhaps, the quickest and the most profitable way of earning money using friends. However, the main drawback of this quick money-making strategy is that such profile is immediately deleted by moderators. As an alternative, social media wolves invite all the gathered friends in a group: the users pin all their faith on the recommendations of celebrities added to their friend list and may willingly join even the group like “Freight Handlers in Denver. Reasonable.” There are some other ways of Facebook bots monetization. But considering their less explicit nature, I withhold further comments.

Sometimes I enjoy myself looking through the users’ comments left on my star bots. As a rule, somewhat half of such messages contain the questions like: “Are you real?” One fourth of the users write declarations of love to their beloved stars. The rest of the company, being absolutely earnest, writes just outright ravings! For example, somebody proposes Paris Hilton to marry him, somebody asks Justin Timberlake for help in making his way into showbiz, and somebody invites James Bond to quaff a brew. Not so long ago I would hardly imagine that people could be so dupable.”

On Facebook one really can come across the real personal pages of many celebrities (for example, remember Vin Diesel having 3,000,000 friends on Facebook) and that is great! But still be careful and beware of the wolves screening themselves behind the appealing but fake faces of celebrities.

3. Posts promotion to top at web-services like Digg and Newsvine
The services like Digg comprise the very essence of Web 2.0 philosophy as here the users themselves select the news worthy of coming to the main page. To promote the news from your own website to the main page is to bring it to everybody’s attention and gain traffic amounting to dozens thousands of users per site. It would be very strange of social media wolves to miss such a juicy opportunity.

As a rule, links from Digg-news lead to either info sites or blogs, though wolves can easily redirect Digg traffic to partner referral systems, to web stores or even to adult sites. To promote this or that news to top they create and promote thousands of fake profiles which vote for the giving news, logging from different IPs. There are also special secret networks for wolves which, by prior consent, vote for each other’s news.

The administration of social news websites is continuously fighting spam in a framework of their projects. Even the slightest relaxation of anti-spam control may lead to the transformation of all the social news web sites into the global scrap-heap on which even the news of Watergate scandal importance would not be able to struggle their way to the main page through Viagra sales offers.

4. Profiles cracking on Facebook and MySpace
You are sure to have got messages from the members of your friend list running something like: “Hi! I am taking part in the Web competition! The grand prize is iPhone! At the moment I am the second best and I fall short just of 2 SMS!! Would you send them, please? They cost only $0.05, I will surely repay to you when we meet next time.” A little later it turns out that the message you have got was sent not by your friend, but by a wolf having cracked his profile, and that you were not the only one who have got the message, it was sent to all the members of his friend list and, finally, that SMS really costs not $0.05 but all $5.

Once, my own profile on the media of Facebook type was similarly cracked. I was very surprised at the fact that 12 out of my 200 friends sent the SMS they have been asked for. Thus, the wolves earned $60 of net income! If it is remembered that profile cracking and messages posting are done by means of special scripts which can break hundreds profiles a day then even those not so good at sums are able to understand that social media wolves are rather rich guys.

5. Mass posting to social bookmark services
Do you really think that the only purpose of social bookmark services is to provide the basis for adding bookmarks to the favorite pages? This is quite common opinion of the majority. But the wolves use such bookmarks for getting links to their own resources. What are bookmarks? Bookmarks are the links to certain pages containing text notes. Undoubtedly, such link as it is would not be of great effect on the search engine but what if there would be thousands of such links?!

Using special scripts the wolves make the mass posting of such bookmarks to their own projects among all the main services. Thus, their keyword positions in search results are being promoted, and social bookmark services are continuously transforming into cesspits for SEO links. However, social media wolves are little or nothing troubled with media ecology issues.

Continue: Social Media Wolves. Part 2