Facebook Spam: AppBank

I hate them. I wonder if the average person pays any attention to them at all? I'm not sure, but no one gets offended when I don't collect and acknowledge that flowery, cutesy "have a great day" animation. At least, I don't think so-- I mean, c'mon, who has time for all that? If you want to tell me to have a great day, tell me; don't send me damn Facebook "gift" (which isn't a gift at all, but an annoyance).

Sending game requests are practically unavoidable if you happen to be killing time with a free, moderately entertaining facebook game. The 5 million Farmville requests I've had over the course of the year, I forgive, but I don't have time to help you harvest imaginary crops. It's not you, it's me. To date, no one has been all omg-you-didn't-help-me-harvest-last-night-you-biatch. No one has unfriended me over Facebook app requests.

I happened to have a lot of these gifts pop up on my news feed this morning because someone I know was busy accepting the app requests and personally thanking everyone who sent one to her. This is fine except this is the page that promotes her brand. Instead making me feel all good about having her on my newsfeed, I find myself annoyed with the flood of "So and So sent This Person a Name of App gift" posts. All the meat of my newsfeed is gone, turning Facebook into Spambook.

It's not branding and I'm sure many people feel the same way I do: Please quit accepting all those gifts en masse!!!! Surely there is something more productive you can do with your time? Need to accept app requests and those annoying gifts? There's an app for that. Seriously, it does it for you. Maybe you don't get to leave a personal thank you, but at least you're accepting a gift before you get unfriended. Oh, and it doesn't spam peoples' news feeds.

Of course, then you'd have to engage your "friends" with words instead. You'd actually have to market your brand in a personable way. It's not impossible and one only has to look at the other successful branding pages to see how that's done. It's about adding to experience of your product, not detracting from it.

Those gifts really detract from it. Really. I can't stop this person, so I'm going to solve the problem on my end by either hiding posts or blocking the application. If I'm not alone in this it makes me wonder how many people feel the same? I'm sure a lot because if it that weren't the case, this woman's brand would be huge. She's got talent, its just hidden behind all that gift spam.

Sorry. I don't have time to look through 100 posts of garbage to find the gems from my friends. I also refuse to support bad marketing. I'm not being shy about that refusal. Want to have a successful Facebook page? Make it a Fan Page and don't hide behind gifts.