The social media giant, Facebook, has just recently opened up a new option to its now over a billion users. Users now have the option to pay a certain sum of money (anywhere from a couple dollars to a couple thousand dollars) to promote their posts to their Facebook friends. You may be wondering, “Why do I need to pay for my friends to see my posts? Can’t they already see what I post?”. The answer to this is yes and no. When Facebook was originally designed, the software included an algorithm which determined what posts a user would see on the top of their news feed. Many Facebook users have upwards of one thousand “friends”, but these users do not see updates from every single one of their “friends”. This algorithm works in a way that users typically will only see posts from people they interact with on the site. Now, Facebook’s introduction of promoted posts will allow for users to ensure that all of their friends see their posts. This is one of the worst ideas that the social network has made throughout their existence. There is a reason why the content-censoring algorithm was created, and that was to ensure that users see posts that are geared towards them. This new concept of promoted posts will no doubt cause anger among users, who will now see posts of users who are utilizing the promoted posts feature. Then again, if you are only friends with people whom you actually care to see information about, these promoted posts will not affect your Facebook experience all that much.
More about promoted posts in this article from Fox News:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/10/04/facebook-to-charge-users-to-promote-posts-to-friends/
What are your thoughts about promoted posts on Facebook (or Twitter, which has been using promoted posts for quite some time already)?
Facebook’s new promoted post program is not surprising. Because of its incredibly large and devoted user base, Facebook can do just about whatever it wants to make money. Think about it. How many people will delete their accounts because of these promoted posts? I doubt hardly any. On the other hand, how many people and corporations will pay to have their posts promoted? I will not be surprised if this trade off will be well worth it for Facebook. Unless users start to delete their accounts in droves, Facebook can do whatever it wants. In the end I think that Facebook’s users will end up just dealing with the promoted posts just like users of Twitter have.
I, too, was shocked by Facebook adding this feature and making it available to every user to pay for if they so choose. I didn’t think Facebook would ever resort to this, but then again, it seems to be consistent with what we have learned about the attention craving society we live in today. A good example I see of this today is all of these people shopping for Halloween costumes. The costume has to be perfect…something everyone will remember me for. Halloween costumes have become a competition among friends, and often times people are willing to spend large sums of money to ensure they are recognized in a group. Paying for Facebook posts follows the same principle, that people weight the benefits of being recognized as more important than the monetary consequence.
Do I think Facebook is right in doing this? No. The algorithm they had before was a very effective way to keep you connected with people you have shown interest in connecting with. But can you fault Facebook for recognizing that society is willing to pay money to be recognized? Facebook will almost certainly make a profit off of this, solely because users are willing to pay. Not because Facebook forced this new feature to be used. People in society have always craved attention, and social networking is the latest way to do that. It will be interesting to see the effects this has on Facebook users and if noticeable amounts of users remove themselves from Facebook because of it. What’s next? Will Twitter allow users to pay money to change the color or font of tweets? (excuse me if this is already possible)
I’m still trying to figure out how to wrap my mind around this whole “promoting a post thing”. The thing that really stirs me up about it is that your friends can see which posts have and have not been promoted. I see that this would be a good business strategy for companies who have been “liked” by different Facebook users. Otherwise, it seems really odd to me that people would use these to reach their friends. When originally trying to decide what I thought of this whole thing I researched it a bit on Facebook. The example that Facebook gave was a two people who had recently gotten engaged that wanted to promote this exciting news. I personally thought this was really dumb because last I checked any change in anybody’s relationship status spreads like wildfire without paying money to cause that to happen. So, yes Pat, I agree with you. The Facebook algorithm is working perfectly and other than for businesses, etc. I think promoting posts will only be an annoyance.