Comments on: Buying Facebook friends or Twitter followers – is wrong

By: Chris Norton

Chris Norton — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:29:33 +0000

Ben – I completely agree. It’s stories like this that give social networking a bad name. Content is king and numbers mean nothing. If you buy 30,000 friends on Facebook what does that actually achieve – Nothing at all.

By: Ben Cotton

Ben Cotton — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:12:57 +0000

Buying friends on Facebook is outrageous and as you rightly say, if you have to resort to such lows ‘then your content, or social media strategy as a whole, is simply not good enough and you need to review them both quickly’.
Facebook need to clamp on this sort of behaviour by uSocial, which is just spam – plain and simple. Hotmail has been completely ruined by spammers and Facebook will be well advised to intervene now, before it is too late.

By: Lloyd Gofton

Lloyd Gofton — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:24:31 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more Chris.
In fact i’ve quoted you in my own post on the subject: http://www.liberatemedia.com/blog/buying-friends-isnt-social-its-antisocial/
As anyone, with even the smallest understanding of social media, will confirm, at the heart of social media is a number of basic elements such as listening, conversation, openness, community, reputation, trust…I could go on. So how does buying followers, friends or votes help?
This is another example of old media rules being applied to a social media world. E.g. If I stick an advert in a newspaper with a readership of one million, I’ll get a massive return, easy! Advert placed, sit down and wait for phone to ring…you’ll be waiting a long time.