You may have noticed recently that when updating a status, a little box appears asking if you would like to promote your status, meaning for $7, you can highlight how important whatever you are doing is to your friends. If clicked, your status update will be moved to the top of all your friends’ newsfeeds to guarantee that they read your uber important update about your life, or at least give it a chance among all of the other hourly updated statuses of your friends. In addition, your status will be displayed for a longer span of time than a usual update. However, if everyone pays to promote their status, won’t we be back to square one in which everyone’s status remains among the clutter? Further, aren’t companies doing this already? They pay to promote their statuses, which is actually called advertising, a pretty popular term these days.
Why would someone want to pay to promote his or her status anyway? Maybe if you just got married and want your wedding album to be a priority on your friends’ newsfeeds. Or maybe you just had a baby and want to show off how adorable he or she is. These examples, however, just feed into the egocentric world we live in today. Everyone wants to promote their life, brag about their life, and share their life amongst everyone they know. Facebook has a good purpose as a whole, but adding a feature to promote a status? That’s about as smart an idea as the guy who just updated everyone that he took a shower.
There are a few practical reasons to promote your status if you have one that is actually worth promoting. There are numerous organizations that can get their word out by clicking promote, or maybe a band might benefit from it to inform their Facebook friends about a show coming up. Maybe you want to raise funds for a good cause, such as an animal shelter. In these cases, having the capacity to highlight your post can help your cause a great deal. However, as a whole, I think that promoting your status, which in a sense is promoting yourself, is just plain weird. We all have those friends that we know will take advantage of this tool and promote as many statuses as they can afford.
What I have come to learn from this new feature is that we live in an even more narcissistic world right now, and Facebook is just adding fuel to the fire. Facebook has convinced everyone that what you have to say is important for everyone else to hear. Paying to feed your ego is, in my opinion, a terrible idea, but as sad is it may sound, it’s not too surprising.
I disagree with your point that people will take “advantage” of this feature. Would people really frivolously spend $7 a pop just to put an annoying status at the top? No, I think that the usefulness of the promoting tool is to facilitate a larger audience for people with a message. This specifically applies to the groups you mentioned – charities and the like. I highly doubt that someone will just spend money to get a meaningless message to the top. If I was trying to raise money for a cause, promoting a status would be a great way to connect to all my friends at once.
I hate the idea of promoted posts, too. In fact, I just wrote a related piece about why it is a terrible way to make money (https://blogs.princeton.edu/sisn/2012/10/18/451/). I quoted your article, too, hope you don’t mind.