1. Tagging Random People in Photos

Please stop tagging people you barely know in photos that have nothing to do with them. It’s one thing when your buddy tags you in an unphotogenic pic, then sends it out to friends for some laughs, because, hey, at least it’s you. But the people I’m talking about upload photos and tag as many people as they can to try and gin up as many likes as possible. This is a classic move by spammers so be cautious of anyone who does this.

2. Liking Your Own Posts

So you’ve just posted the cutest cat or baby picture ever. That’s cool, I guess. But then you go ahead and like your photo too. Well, I know you already like the post, aren’t you the one who just shared the damn thing? Besides being annoyingly repetitive, the real reason people feel the need to do this is that the action of liking the post will again show up in the streaming news ticker, giving the post even more exposure (it’s potentially seen twice). These are typically the moves of self-proclaimed “social media gurus” or people who just feel insecure about their status posts.

3. Overdone Like Buttons

Somehow I’ve ventured over to your blog only to be greeted by an alarming pop-up Facebook “like” box baiting me to like your page. And then, when that goes away, I can barely even see your blog post because of the 100 “like” buttons strategically placed throughout your site.

4. The Ridiculous Event Invite

I’m honored you want me to come to your poetry reading in Siberia, but I’m not quite sure I’ll be able to make it. When you send mass requests to a bunch of people you don’t really know, it makes you seem inconsiderate and pretty much paints you as a spammer.

5. New Page Invites

Look, I understand you need to create a page for your business, but please stop inviting me to your half-ass Facebook pages. Instead post interesting content to your own page, share it on your profile as well (so your friends see it), and if people find it interesting they will follow. It’s almost not your fault, as creating a page and inviting all your friends can be tempting, but most of your friends won’t like your page and maybe they won’t like you anymore either. And the ones who do like it would’ve probably found it anyways without your begging them to do so.

6. Off-base and Mass Messages

Stop sending mass messages with dozens of people attached. You’ve seen these before, like “please like my page” or “vote for me in this ridiculous award I can’t win,” etc. People loathe being addressed in this style, and if you really have something to say at the very least personalize your message to each individual or, better yet, refrain altogether from sending out mass messages.

7. App Requests

If you’re on Facebook all day playing Farmville, that should be embarrassing enough, and the last thing you should ever want to do is invite your friends and alert them to your nerdiness. And I can’t even explain to you the ill feeling I get when I receive a request to join Klout, for example, even though I’ve already registered, from one of my less intelligent friends.

8. Adding People to Random Groups

This one’s a big pet peeve of mine. A classic text-book spam artist move, people will add you to random groups without your knowledge and all of a sudden you’re signed up for every single notification for each posts to the group. If this happens to you, make sure to leave the group or at least turn off the notifications within the group settings, as well as question the friendship with the culprit who added you. You don’t want to be the person known for doing this on Facebook, it’s a huge red flag.

9. Suggesting Friends

Please stop suggesting I friend somebody else. You playing match-maker is a little creepy and I might start to question why you and I are friends instead. And it’s actually worse than creepy because, you see, on Facebook expert spammers pair up and start suggesting up to 50 random friends for each other. By doing this, the people they suggest will get the notification (in their friend requests) and may mistakenly think the spammers requested the friendship. In reality, the spammers want you to commit the first step by adding them as friends (essentially tricking you to friend request them). Facebook penalizes people for requesting too many friends, but spammers who pair up and suggest friends for each other escape notice since they are not actually doing the requesting.

10. Cross-Posting From Twitter

Look, I understand you’re a little short on content and things to say. We all basically post the same stuff on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. but at least have the decency to not automatically send your Twitter tweets to Facebook. For one, you’ll get much less engagement posting to Facebook via any third-party app let alone Twitter which basically disregards Facebook etiquette.