Jon Loomer, a highly respected authority on Facebook marketing, published a blog post at the end of last year titled “Why Our Obsession with Facebook Page Post Reach is All Wrong“. While I often find Jon’s insights helpful, I was slightly annoyed by the above article when I first read it. Initially, I let it slide. However, since then, Jon has been republishing the same blog post on his Facebook page on at least a couple of occasions. Basically, he argues that Facebook needs the news feed to be a good user experience, and that they can’t possibly show allContinue reading »

We previously wrote a quick guide on how to get the right thumbnail to show when posting a link on Facebook. Unfortunately this method did not always work, so we could not hide our excitement yesterday when we discovered that Facebook has made it possible to upload an image when posting a link on Facebook. To show how helpful a function this can be, let me take this post from Jon Loomer as an example: His post links to a blog post titled “Facebook EdgeRank: Which Post Type is Best“, and the only image included in the article is thisContinue reading »

For a long time I have blogged about the Chinese scammers operating on Facebook with the implicit blessing of Mark Zuckerberg’s spam team. While the spam ads are usually removed within a few days or weeks, it seems to be good business as new ads appear on a daily basis. Today these three Facebook advertisements caught my eye: “Baggu” is the Japanese word for “bag”, and “handobaggu” is how a Japanese would typically pronounce the English word “handbag”. Finding good .com domain names isn’t easy, but RunFa Zhou (obviously not his real name) really used his imagination for this scam:Continue reading »

This is a follow-up to the blog post I wrote the other day on newbalanceshop-jp.com, which is a scam website advertising on Facebook. I sent an email to GoDaddy about the domain in question having incorrect WHOIS data and that newbalanceshop-jp.com is hosting a counterfeiting website: “Both newbalanceshop-jp.com and 2013shop-jp.com are registered using fake addresses and are participating in illegal counterfeiting and false advertising.” The response I got back from GoDaddy simply stated: “We have neither access to, nor jurisdiction over the content on this site. Any issues regarding the content of the website will need to be addressed eitherContinue reading »

Since I have not written about the Facebook Japan scam this month, here is another update: Surprise, surprise! Facebook Japan has taken absolutely no action to stop fraudsters advertising. Here are just a couple that I saw today: newbalanceshop-jp.com was registered just a few days ago by an individual living in ” niuyork, AL 52365″. Now, that is a great address: On the other hand, 2013shop-jp.com is registered through GoDaddy at the equally interesting address “fdfdf, Georgia 43433”: Since both domains were registered through GoDaddy, I will report them to GoDaddy and see what happens.

I took another look at my Facebook ads today and found some new ones that looked more than a little suspicious: The most interesting one was the Louis Vuitton ad. As far as I can recall, it’s just the second time that I’ve seen scammers advertise this brand on Facebook (first time was here). It’s often repeated that over 85% of Tokyo women in their 20s own a piece of Louis Vuitton, though I think this figure is highly exaggerated. Still, it remains an extremely popular brand here and a status symbol that people work hard to buy. It’s worthContinue reading »

Facebook is doing nothing to stop the scam ads for counterfeit products. On the other hand, the Chinese scammers are improving their game. Today I saw a couple of ads for Oakley and Ray-Ban: I first took a look at balala.asia, which was registered just a few days ago for 1 year: As I have stated previously as well, an easy way for Facebook to stop these scammers would be to extra carefully review ads submitted for domains registered during the last few months or so. It’s well-known that the age of a domain is one factor considered by GoogleContinue reading »

Here are a couple more fraudulent Facebook advertisements that I discovered today: watch-shop-japan.com is somewhat interesting as it is the first advertisement that I’ve seen for fake watches. The brands sold include Diesel, Rolex, and Tag Heuer. As normal the domain has been registered by a scammer in China: jp-oakley.com follows the same pattern as the other scam sites advertising on Facebook: Facebook could easily stop these ads by double checking the domain registration dates for sites that want to advertise on Facebook. All the sites that I have featured so far have domains that were registered during the lastContinue reading »

Just to show that Facebook has not stopped accepting advertising from fraudulent online stores: kukinifree.com uses a gmail address ([email protected]) as contact information and the domain was registered in China last year: To me this does not look like a very reputable website for Nike shoes. The [email protected] email address was actually also used for the Oakley sites that I wrote about earlier this year. Today I came across this blog post written by a Japanese user. Even if you can not read Japanese, you can see that he received fake and broken sunglasses after seeing an advertisement for oakleyjpshop.comContinue reading »

Some of the bigger atheist Facebook pages, including Addicting Info and Antitheists, have been posting the following photo on Facebook today: As you can see above, the quotation states: “Women are naturally unfit for political office. Both the natural order and facts show us that the political being par excellence is male; the Scripture shows us that woman has always been the helper of man who thinks and does, but nothing more“. Not surprisingly, this quotation is spreading like wildfire on twitter as well. The problem is of course that the pope has never said such a thing. In anContinue reading »