The great thing with LinkedIn Groups and Facebook Pages is that they are started by people you can connect with, and they allow exchanging ideas, asking questions and so on, especially LinkedIn Groups.
I’m a member of several LinkedIn Groups and of course in many of these groups, there are people who “spam”.
Let’s define spam here as adding links to your own company, services or whatever without any value for the discussion but only for SEO or self-promotion purposes.
That’s inevitable, except if, as an administrator and/or founder of such a Group, you decide to ban self-promoters for life. You can do the same on a Facebook Page, in a Ning community, on your blog, etc.
Personally, I look at what people say, for instance on our Facebook Page, and when I see that it’s what I define as “spam”, I talk to them about it and sometimes delete it.
When a spam discussion becomes spam
But it is what it is. The stupid thing is that, as you go on in a LinkedIn Group about “your spamming rules and self-promotion guidelines” you start a discussion that never ends.
In a LinkedIn Group, I will not name, this is the case. In every mail, I get from that group, there are mainly comments on that “spamming"entry. So, in the end, the mails from that group have become meaningless and spam themselves.
So, what do you do? Of course it’s great to ask the members of your Group what they think about self-promotion or spam.
But a message for people who have ‘communities’: communities exist. All you do, when providing a platform like a Facebook Page or LinkedIn Group is providing a channel to people and existing communities to gather around a specific topic.
But in the end, it’s not your community, it’s only a platform. So, either you provide it and ask some input regarding terms and conditions and then take a decision (yes, you can have a policy!), either you don’t provide it.
But you don’t have to ask everything to the people that are your so-called community. And certainly not feature that discussion three months in a row!
This being said (I’m really fed up with the spam discussions), here is a YouTube video if you hate or even like spam. It’s stupid but fun and I loved it as a kid.
Enjoy (or not) and have a good weekend. And please comment and if you add a link to your business, so be it: people are not dumb, they will see that your comment is a link building or self-promotion act.
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