- May 15, 2012
- Posted by: admin
- Categories: Blog, Uncategorized
When you post on Facebook, only few of our friends actually view it. Shocked? Well, it appears that not many people care about you, your cat pictures or your new hairstyle.
Anyway, for many of you attention seekers, Facebook is testing a new feature called ‘Highlight’. Highlighted posts will appear higher in the news feed and will be visible to more of your friends. Attention awaits you for only $2 a post.
How it works?
If you are a part of Facebook’s testing group, you will see a Highlight option next to like or comment buttons. Click it, a payment box pops up asking you to pay $2 via Credit card or PayPal. Right now, a few lucky users can highlight their posts free of charge.
The highlighted post will not stand out visually. It will just make the post visible to more of your friends. That is, everyone in your friends list will see it in their news feed rather than the select few who frequent your profile and actually care about you.
Facebook said: ‘We’re constantly testing new features across the site.This particular test feature is simply to gauge people’s interest in this method of highlighting and sharing with their friends’.
If Facebook gets positive response from users then it has the potential to turn in to a revenue generation engine. For businesses, this feature can be a good promotion tool. As many people are using Facebook through their smartphones which doesn’t support ads, so brands and businesses can highlight their posts on their fan page and pay for greater impact.
I personally doubt if people would pay the social networking giant for their posts to be noticed.This paid feature can be a big turn off for users even if they are interested in highlighting due to associated costs. For rest of us, our Facebook feed can become a source of annoyance; reminiscence of game posts in the early Facebook Wall days.
What are your thoughts? Would you pay Facebook to get noticed, if this feature is made available on your account?
8 Comments
Comments are closed.
1. Would I pay? Absolutely not. But then again, I’m one of the few who doesn’t have a presence on Facebook.
2. I can only see businesses using it. Normal users won’t pay, and they’ll get annoyed at the spam from companies – so they’ll unfriend the companies and eventually discard Facebook as being irrelevant. The opportunity will open up more for a rival company.
If there is a threshold limit to it, then it might work out well. If not, then get ready for a heap of marketing-sticky-posts. Companies excessively using this will eventually lose followers.
It doesn’t sound like a particularly bright idea to charge Facebook users for anything. Charging for highlighting posts would have two undesirable effects – you need to take a credit card at the time of registration on FB to be able to charge and many times having to enter a credit card dissuades people from registering. Further if you highlight paid posts, it detracts from the value of FB for users because you are seeing essentially paid advertisements when you log on to catch up with your friends. Nothing will drive users away from FB faster than advertising mixed with posts. FB derives its power from the enormous volume of users on the site and the ability to expose these millions of people to advertising in a way that does not hinder their use of the site and its features but provides value for money to advertisers. There are other more innovative ways of monetizing the traffic that FB receives and advertising may not be the best way but then that is a different topic which I am not attempting to answer here.
The question to ask would be, what if the person paid to highlight useless and trivial statements regarding such as the content that is usually seen on FB. For instances, all the posts about “going to work now”, “look at us at a party”, “my child got an A”. Not to say these events aren’t meaningful to the person who posted, but why are they so meaningful to the mass reader that the FB member wants to pay to post and highlight the fact that they just stopped at Starbucks for a mochachino??
Despite many users are going against this feature, I dont quite feel the same way.
I would take this opportunity (while its still new) and look into it further on Analytics. After that, i will try tweaking and optimizing it further to see if its worth it. If it works, then continue on. If it doesnt, then drop it.
I personally dont judge if things will work by just guessing. Testing and tweaking are keys here. Stats dont lie afterall.
It depends on what is your goal using Facebook. If you are a insurance agent, you may need that to get noticed (I am sure people will reject his content if all content is about insurance).
Social media is about building relationship. Even one gets A LOT of noticed, doesn’t mean one is great in building relationship. Get noticed is one way communication. building relationship needs two way communication.
This is Facebook’s way of unobtrusive advertising or promotion. A little like sponsored stories.
I agree that we need good content and strong relationships with our audience but do know that at best only 16% of our post will reach our fans.
So Facebook is definitely looking at “offering” other ways for marketers to highlight or promote their stories or posts … I’ve just wrote a post about “free marketing” – you should be able to see it on my blog page – would love to have your feedback!
Louisa
Would you pay Gumtree $10 to advertise your apartment? Yes…well if you’re well connected this function will allow users to promote a variety of goods to a trusted network (including charitable donations via things like JustGiving.com), ‘narcissism’ is a small element of the overall potential for this new function.