By Chris Lee

Some shocking statistics have been publicised recently which highlight the potential extent of “social web spam”. Impermium, a social web security company formed by three former Yahoo! anti-spam and email security experts, unveiled the findings of its first report into the problem.

Based on a sample of more than 104 million social media transactions tracked over its clients’ social networks during a 100-day period this summer, Impermium found that fraudulent accounts range from a low of five per cent to a high of 40 per cent of users. This means that on certain networks less than two thirds (60 per cent) of accounts are genuine.

The field included 90 million social media users in 72 countries. Based on its new Impermium Index, transactions analysed included user-generated content (UGC) posted on social networks, blogs, bookmarking sites and other web assets. As they are not Impermium clients, the data does not even include fake accounts and activity on Facebook and Twitter, two of the world’s most prominent social networks.

Ticking time bomb

Impermium reports that “sleeper cells” of social web abuse are “a ticking time bomb”. The company helped protect one “prominent social network” from a co-ordinated attack by “more than 30,000 fraudulent accounts, which lit up in a single hour and attempted to submit more than 475,000 malicious wall posts.”

Imperium warned that social web spam moves fast according to popular events and seeks to exploit that online. The deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Amy Winehouse, plus news surrounding Hurricane Irene in the USA, were exploited to coax social media users in clicking on malicious links, the company said.

Brands are not exempt from suffering social web spam, either. Boot maker Ugg was found to be the most-exploited brand in social media channels, twice as many times as Gucci and five times that of Prada. The top consumer categories for social web spam were fashion and electronics, both of which outstripped porn scams by three times.

Getting a true measure of social

In his regular blog for Econsultancy, Patricio Robles argued that it would be unwise for companies to write off social media as a marketing tool, even if a significant minority of users are indeed fake accounts. Rather, that Imperium’s research underlines the importance of companies measuring meaningful social media metrics.

“The number of fans and followers you have is an easy metric to track, but it's also typically going to be of limited use for many reasons, just one of which is the fact that many of those fans and followers may not be real,” Robles wrote. “To accurately assess the strength of your social media presence, setting tangible, action-related goals and measuring their achievement will increasingly be required as spammers continue to flood social platforms with fake accounts.”