It's hard to imagine an internet without spam in this rapidly changing technology dependent world. And with recent reports it's easy to see why. Security firm Nexgate found that spam on social networks has tripled in the first half off this year. With a 355 percent increase from 60 million pieces of data collected, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn are a spammer's jackpot.

"It's no surprise that the 'bad guys' are targeting today's most population dense communication medium; however, until now few have truly investigated the methods of the new age spammers, or developed technology to adequately address the problem," the Nexgate report states. Reading the whole report is recommended for anyone who deals with social media marketing - even a little bit.


Nexgate's report says that 1 in 21 social messages contain risky content. It's new Global Social Media Spam List is the first and only such list created to stop spam on branded social media pages across social networks.

Detecting Spammers on Social Networks, a 2010 study done by professors from the University of California, lists 4 different kinds of spammers with varying strategies and aggressiveness in the way they sent spam. Over the years, these methods have become harder to detect and more prevelant around the world.

A 'displayer' bot wherein a victim must personally visit the social media page to view the spam content and is one of the least effective. The 'bragger' bot posts messages to their own feed and as a result, display on the victim's feed. The spammers downside is that only people who follow them will see the post on their feed.

 'Poster' bots send a direct message to a person by posting directly on their page. This ensures their friends will see it as well, covering more ground and reaching more eyes. The final 'whisperer' bot sends a private message to the victim.

Warding your computer against these different kinds of spam isn't simple but it is doable. Using caution is the easiest solution. Clicking on the email assuring you that you've won a new car might be cause for worry. Immediately deleting it is the best option. There are also a lot of spam filtering software's that detect keywords and phrases that are linked with known spam accounts and can get rid of them before they become a problem.

Nexgate offers a list of known spammers that can be viewed only after purchasing its full service. This costs some money, but for some people it's more than worth the cost. When you consider all the time saved by not chasing spammers, the cost seems very reasonable.

Junk posts are growing faster than legitimate human text posts and it's not just for fun. Spammers are making close to $200 million off of their Facebook spam alone. Researchers from the International Computer Science Institute found that 27 organizations were making $160k a year on their seven million fraudulent accounts. This is why it's important to find comprehensive marketing course.