Social networks are inherently constrained by the relationships they create. This is nothing new; research from Paul Lazarsfield and Elihu Katz in their book "Personal Influence," penned in 1955, demonstrated that the bigger a person's network grows, the smaller the influence of other members becomes.

If a user has a lot of friends on Facebook and an application is trying to leverage the newsfeed to spit out messages, it's unlikely that they will be paid anything more than scant attention. Social networking friends are not always close -- they are cursory buddies who scan through vast fields of data looking for interesting tidbits. If a brand attempts to surmount these challenges through increasing the frequency of their messaging, they can be perceived as spammy.

Repeat postings on a user's newsfeed, especially if they are unsolicited, will damage brand perception and leave the social networker wondering if they have a virus. The "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" Spraychel for President campaign, while not the best brand for social networking, does make good use of the newsfeed and ensures that it is not overdone. Ultimately, for messages to propagate, they must stick out among all of the other data passing across the network, and be generated by the user, not the system.

A Facebook news feed