Spam (the most often unwanted email correspondences, not the guilty pleasure meat product) it usually flagged by your email filter, and if it somehow gets by, it doesn’t take the most astute observer to recognize a claim that’s probably not going to hold water.

But what if all of this spam started to overwhelm you on your social networks like Facebook and Twitter? Neolane has addressed this with an infographic that asks the question What If Spam Were True? Basically, the hypothetical situation explored is one where all of those messages you see – “I won 4 free iPads” and “I make 500 dollars a day sitting at home for 1 hour of work” – are actually coming from your friends on Facebook. What if the brands and people on Facebook that you trust were spamming the hell out of your news feed?

What if you missed the important updates, the real life events of your friends and family, or even the important promotions and actions of the organizations you actually wanted to see, because “Cousin Ed” took only “six weeks to get that diploma” or every other update was about the “free iPad” you could win when filling out that survey.

They warn that companies have to be careful with the social media advertising, as to not drown out the stuff people really come to Facebook to see. As more brands begin to utilize Facebook’s sponsored stories (and the wide world of the open graph with sponsored action stories), we’ll see if our news feeds end up looking like the spam folder in your email.

Via: Neolane