Important LinkedIn SWAM Update

If you are an active LinkedIn user and an active participant on LinkedIn Discussion Groups, you are probably aware of the controversy that has surrounded LinkedIn’s SWAM policy. While SWAM aimed to cut down the level of spam being posted in Discussion Groups, it has been a huge thorn in the side of many well-intentioned and legitimate LinkedIn users.

SWAM refers to a policy implemented by LinkedIn which stipulates that if you are “blocked and deleted” from one of your Discussion Groups, all of the posts in the rest of your Groups are automatically put in “marked for moderation.” Since a majority of Groups are not actively moderated and are generally open to the public, often times these posts lay in the purgatory of moderation queue for eternity.

Sounds scary, right? Have no fear, there have been some positive developments on the SWAM front that we, the legitimate LinkedIn users, will all benefit from.

When first “announced” in January 2013, SWAM went very much under the radar; – nearly two years after its implementation, people are still unaware of its existence. I use quotation marks around “announced” because it could barely described as an announcement; it was actually a single post on an obscure Discussion Group (ironic?) called LinkedIn Groups Product Forum, a Group that has fewer than 6,000 members. Just to give you some perspective, LinkedIn has over 300,000,0000 users and nearly 61%  of them say that Groups are in their list of top five most valued LinkedIn features. That’s a heck of a lot more people than 5,000.

So what’s the good news, you might ask? Up until recently, SWAM was an indefinite punishment. Previously, once you were SWAMd, it was for life. While there were a few things you could do to help, such as contact each moderator and plead your case, it was a huge pain to deal with me, and for many people, it was enough to just make them give up on LinkedIn altogether. Now, however, the powers that be have added a stipulation to the policy:

You’ll be subject to moderation for up to a week or two per occurrence. This can vary depending on the number of occurrences.

That one little phrase: “up to a week or two…”, changes the entire game. It means that even if you get SWAMd, you only have to wait a short period of time before you’re no longer in “time-out,” essentially making SWAM a slap on the wrist. Additionally, the fact that LinkedIn has included actual time period in their update is great news for us marketers – we can now know, with a degree of certainty, when we will be able to post normally again after being SWAMd. While this is still an annoyance for those of us who wrongfully get SWAMd, it is something I think that we can live with, and I suspect this is the first step towards phasing out the policy altogether.

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Importance of Social Spam Removal

You’ve worked hard to get the Facebook page for your business looking awesome, your website streamlined, and your Twitter follower count into the stratosphere. Will you let it all fall apart because of lack of maintenance?

Imagine building a home. With the right crew and good weather, you might be able to get it built and finished within three or four months. How long would it take to tear down with a few hand grenades and a flamethrower? A few hours at most. Destroying things is always quicker and easier than creating them, and a few hand-grenade-spam posts or a vindictive online flamethrower can burn your social reputation to the ground before you know what’s going on. If you let them.

Don’t Stop Me, Even if You’ve Heard This One Before

Just like thunder in the never-ending weather patterns, I’m back to remind you once again that maintaining your social media accounts on a daily basis is an absolute requirement, not a suggestion, to become and remain successful in the space. Sorry to beat a dead horse, but truth is truth.

I don’t know about you, but I almost always read the comments at the end of any article to see what the general public has to say about the matter. I often find additional insight from commenters that will make the information that much more clear or interesting. It’s extremely annoying when you are reading comments and come to what is obviously a spammy ad for something else. They’ll mention something about the article and then try to get you to follow their link for “better” information, or sometimes they don’t even put in that much time.

Incendiary Posts are Often Spam

A post or comment doesn’t have to be an ad or a spammy link to be considered spam. There are plenty of trolls out there who get their jollies by trying to defame or denigrate people and businesses by randomly posting negative comments on their blogs, posts, or feeds. Sometimes they are even paid by your competitors to do so.

These spammy and/or negative comments are grenades thrown into your building, but they don’t have to do any damage. Grenades always have a time frame that they can be removed before they go off and blow things up, even if it’s a short one. The attacking posts on your pages can also be removed before they do much damage, but the longer they remain the more they do.

The Fine Line

The line you don’t want to cross is removing legitimate complaints or issues from real customers. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference, but usually a social media manager with experience can spot the spammers and trolls a mile away. Of course, that doesn’t matter if don’t use one, which is one good reason you should.

Removing legitimate complaints can have worse implications than leaving spam in your posts. If your real customers start to think that you don’t care about your customers problems, they’ll drop you like a hot potato. Always try to diffuse situations with legitimate complaints, and only remove the comments if they become worse or cannot be satisfied through reaching out.

Spam, on the other hand, should be removed within seconds if possible, hours at the most. Moderating comments is one way to avoid this issue, but unless you post the legitimate complaints as well you’re back to the previous problem of losing trust. This isn’t a hard lesson to learn, but it can be a costly one if not learned quickly. For the least hassles and the best results, it’s always recommended to let a professional handle your accounts under your oversight.

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How to Reduce Spam on Your Inbound Marketing Website

Did you know that bots account for up to 61.5% of traffic, according to this study? This bot traffic occurs for a variety of reasons. For example, Google uses bots to spider the internet. There are also spambots, who act maliciously to add advertising links. Regardless, accounting for fake traffic and avoiding spam should be on every inbound marketer’s radar. Here are a few quick tips to protecting your inbound website:

Setup comment moderation

Most blog comment tools allow for you to set up moderation. Meaning blog comments do not show up until they get approved, and someone at your company will receive notification to review the comment before it gets posted.

Concerned about decreased engagement on your blog because users won't see their comments right away? There are popular comment plugins, like Disqus, that require social accounts. While it’s not completely bullet proof for spam, it does help with social engagement!

Protect your forms

If you are using a built-in CMS form tool, talk with your provider about what options you have to protect yourself from form spam if it becomes an issue.

Form tools that come from plugins can usually be modified to include validation. Here are some examples:

• Email fields that look for valid syntax (something@something.com)
• Email fields that reject entries from @aol.com or @gmail.com addresses (or prevent competitors from filling out your forms as well)

There are also plugins that help prevent form entries from spam-ridden IP addresses altogether, like project honey pot.

Remove and redirect old pages

It’s important to do some housekeeping on your website. Do you have an old landing page from a conference 3 years ago? Delete the page and create a redirect record, re-pointing that URL address to another relevant page. Also make sure it’s removed from any sitemaps you share with the search engines.

Change passwords regularly & tighten user access

This is pretty simple – change your passwords regularly! Use strong passwords and keep the records on secure websites. Remove user accounts for employees that have left your company or vendors that no longer work with you.

Another tip – don’t give more access than is necessary for contractors or vendors.

Monitor your index, traffic activity for inconsistencies

Be vigilant and look for overall trends in your data. Make sure you have tools set up and configured to monitor traffic sources, downtime and inbound link activity. A few tools we recommend:

• Uptime reporting tools like Uptime Robot and SiteUptime (fun note: these are also bots, so not all bots are bad)
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools

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How to Make Your Email Marketing Campaigns Spam-Proof

Email marketing is a key component of any marketing campaign nowadays. However, if marketers fail to properly craft e-newsletters and other emailed marketing peripherals, they’ll simply end up in spam folders and will never be seen by their intended recipients—all that hard work will have gone to waste.

Here are a few tips to increase the likelihood of your emails successfully getting past spam filters and ending up in inboxes. Only by improving your emails’ delivery rate can you try to boost their response rate.

Take some time to craft your emails properly.

o   Work carefully on your subject line!  —  You’ll need to master the creation of subject lines.  Your email subject line has to pique your readers’ attention while being succinct and timely.  Strike a balance between being simple and being too clever.  Adding the date can help you get past spam filters and give you an air of relevance.

 o   Create a proper newsletter.  —  Focus on crafting excellent content.  The best content allows its author’s voice and personality to shine through.  Speak to your readers.  Be witty without overdoing it.  Be entertaining and informative.  Remember to be concise and get to the point; you don’t want your readers to delete your emails out of boredom.

 o   Avoid unnecessary extras.  —  Resist the temptation to go overboard with images, hyperlinks, complex HTML, and the like. Adding these can actually boost your spam score.  Instead, rely on the quality of your content.

 

o   Remind your readers.  —  Reach out to your recipients and encourage them to whitelist your email address in order to prevent your emails from ending up in their spam folders.

 o   Advertise wisely.  —  Pick your advertisers and partners with extreme care.  You’ll need to make sure you don’t promote advertisers and/or partners with iffy reputations.  By doing so, your association with them can help drive up your ‘spam score’, and can wreck your reputation with your clientele at the same time.

 o   Always make sure to verify your subscribers.  —  Whenever someone subscribes, they should automatically be sent an email that requires them to verify their subscription.  This is important and ensures that your email ‘blasts’ are only sent to valid email addresses.  It also makes sure that your marketing peripherals don’t end up in the inboxes of people who don’t wish to receive them.

 o   Use spam-checkers!  —  Test your emails constantly for ‘spamminess’. You can run the content of your emails past any of the several spam-checker sites online before sending them out.  This is just another way to increase the likelihood of your email getting successfully into your recipients’ inbox.

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