TMSM Mythbusters: You Can Win A Disney Trip and How’d You Get Your Followers

The goal of this blog series is to factually prove or disprove rumors and myths in the Disney-verse. Tonight on TMSM Mythbusters we are tackling a scam we all see on Facebook regarding Disney and a myth about TMSM!
You Can Win A Disney Trip
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This myth really is more of a PSA warning that we hope will help you protect your personal information. Way to often I see my Disney friend’s sharing posts about winning tickets and free trips to the parks or a free cruise thanks to online “Disney” run Facebook contests. These posts show up on Facebook accounts that are only a few months old and only post about their giveaway, have about 1/10 the followers  that the actual parks pages have and they use the same profile picture as the actual Disney Parks and Disney Cruise Line pages. You will also see things like “Disneyland.  is giving away a Disney Cruise Line Cruise”  and “DisneyWorld is giving away a DisneyCruise”. The best part is that when you click on these page’s “entry” urls instead of redirecting to a Disney owned website you end up at some weird url asking you to sign up for accounts, refer X many people and they tell you you can get bonus entries for sharing the contest on Facebook. These contests are in fact scams. Sadly the people who run these sites are using your trust and faith in Disney for their own personal benefit and in the process phish your personal information!

Here are some things to remember when entering Disney run contests are that they rarely offer any type of contest where the entry form is on a web site that doesn’t end in “disney.go.com”. This is because Go.com (or the The Go Network) is Disney’s landing page. Also, the people who Disney employees in their social networking department know their stuff!  For example in the case of a Walt Disney World giveaway the CM’s in that department know that creating a new Facebook account solely to give away tickets makes no sense. Why would you create a new page in hopes people would find it and follow it, when the existing Walt Disney World Facebook account has over 15,000,000 followers? 
The way to tell if a page “Giving away Disney Tickets” or a “Disney Trip” is a scam is simple! If you see a Facebook page offering a Disney Parks or Cruise Line give away that doesn’t direct you to a Disney owned webpage or doesn’t have Facebook’s blue verified logo beside their name, it’s probably a scam.  If the page is named “Disneyland.” “DisneyWorld.” “Disney.Aulani” or anything other variation of words and punctuation, it’s probably a scam. If the page is only months old and carries a Disney Parks or Resort name it is a scam. All of Disney’s Facebook accounts were created years ago, some spanning back to 2009.  The most important thing to remember Disneyland doesn’t host giveaways for Walt Disney World and vice versa and the parks don’t host giveaways on Facebook etc. in part because Disney uses their contests to build their marketing list but also because Facebook is very particular about how giveaways are done on their system. Below is a graphic we have used on TMSM to help people find “scammy” Disney give aways. Hopefully it helps you!
10325129_10202345954945101_637252149192409120_nAlso you come across one of these pages please take a moment to report it to Facebook as a scam and feel free to share this article or the graphic above on the scam pages walls in hopes of helping keep others from giving their personal information to scammers! Remember my friends, if it seems to good to be true, it probably is. And this makes those great prizes offered by “Disneyland.” and “Disney.World” as being BUSTED!

TMSM Mythbusters Busted

How’d You Get Your Followers
Last week as many know I was recovering from the flu so I missed the chance to properly address this myth when TMSM hit 340,000 followers on Facebook. Since we just celebrated this milestone I figured we should take a moment to address the myth that TMSM buys fans.
On November 8, 2013 the main page hit 100,000 followers and quickly grew to 300,000 by June 15, 2014. For some reason this myth started circulating about the time that TMSM’s followers numbers exploded.
What many of you don’t realize is that TMSM’s staff is incredibly small and we are all volunteers. TMSM is not owned by a travel agency to help pay it’s moderators and writers with either cash or travel referrals.

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Screen Shot 2015-02-09 at 8.17.04 PMAs many of you know Facebook allows pages to buy ads and there are also ways to buy followers and interactions. The first option will show as a boosted post in your Facebook feed. The second tends to lead to a horrible amount of followers from click-scams and use to show in a site’s public information, sadly though Facebook recently changed what information followers saw.
Over the last year of so we have had people come to us and accuse TMSM of buying followers and fans. This myth is 100% false. TMSM staff has always told these people if you’ll show us your analytics we will show you ours. What this would do is prove that TMSM following is 100% organic and today, thanks to approval from Michele, we’re going to do that to put this myth to bed! TMSM is proud of it’s following and thankful for everyone one of the 340,000+ followers it has on Facebook.

Screen Shot 2015-02-09 at 8.17.35 PM So it it with great pride and pleasure that tonight I get to prove to you that the nasty rumor and myth that TMSM buys followers and likes is in fact false. Making this Disney related myth BUSTED!

TMSM Mythbusters Busted

Michele
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