Fanboxes - considered evil, please move on.

The time is nigh, the tipping point will occur soon when social media will create more link bait and spam than actual content.  This is starting to be seen on Twitter quite a lot now, pointless retweets from bots, follows from bots and now the hacked account direct message fiasco..... we've given an inch and the others have taken a mile.

The "fanbox" is something else that's a bit of a circle vulture as well.  It's a self serving tool for two sets of users.  Firstly the likes of the issuing site (Facebook for example) who are wanting to drive traffic back to their wares to justify the advertising revenue costs.  Secondly are the "fans" themselves.  What I've noticed though is that these "fans" aren't really fans.  Most of the time these "fans" are desperate to be noticed to so they'll join anything to get noticed.  Fanboxes merely spread the thin veil of nonsense even further.

In our social media quest to be noticed users have wanting put their name to anything to be noticed.  Yes the power of social networking is great, mighty and all that but it's starting to water down to the point it's nearly a homoepathic treatment.  

And how to you truely measure the returns from these fanboxes anyway?  If someone adds you on a networking site it's never mentioned (most of the time) where the referral has come from.  No one I've come across anyone asking to link with me and leaving a note, "Hi, I saw your profile on the fans of solenoid relays, you seem like a cool kinda guy.  I'd like to add you to me network." 

Fanboxes only work if you truely are a fan in the first place.  I personally believe they don't create a lot of traffic to you or your brand.  Perhaps it's now time to take stock, think responsibly and see where all of this is going.  If it carries on this way social networking will be 1% useful and 99% useless.