Has Samsung no shame? The smart phone company gained some bad publicity recently when information leaked regarding their payment of Taiwanese students to write bad reviews about opposition tech firm, HTC. At the time, the SouthKorean tech giant blamed their social media agency, but it looks like they could be back to their naughty ways.

Reports are surfacing that Samsung is creating spam Twitter accounts to post positive messages about the Galaxy S4. The fakery may not be directly from Samsung, but there is a certainty that it does form part of the Galaxy S4 launch. The tactics were reviewd by Twitter data specialists, Peek Analytics. Tweets that were in favour of the S4 tweeted around the time of the launch (24 April – 29 April), were found to be extremely pro-Samsung tweets.

Of the tweet activity during the launch weekend, Peek Analytics found that 60% of the accounts tweeting about the S4 were real.

Despite the proliferation of fake accounts, some Twitter accounts are constantly tweeting Samsung messages on a daily basis. These accounts are legitimate.

The data found that 564 Twitter accounts tweeted about the S4 over 25 times. It is one thing to be genuinely excited about your phone and tweet about it, but when that number of tweets reaches five a day, red flags are raised.

A Twitter account with the handle @novv tweets about Samsung for the majority of their tweets, a trend which came out of nowhere on 6 May 2013. This account tweeted over 500 S4 related tweets over the launch weekend. This is suspicious behaviour to say the least.

It should also be noted that these pro-Samsung tweets are not of a huge advantage to the compnay. But the advertising agency or social media agency may want these numbers to show the company as they are judged on the output rather than the outcome. It does however get the company name and new product out into the social meida space.

[Source: Forbes]