A USA Today article came out this evening regarding facebook’s plans to potentially initiate a “promote user post” feature. This feature would charge users to promote their posts, similar to the same process advertisers use. One’s desired post would appear at the top of their friend’s news feeds. According to Facebook software engineer, Abhishek Doshi, “Every day, news feed delivers your posts to your friends. Sometimes a particular friend might not notice your post, especially if a lot of their friends have been posting recently.” Facebook execs did not specify how much these “promotions” would cost, but there have been talks of a $7 charge per post.
Many people are apprehensive about this charge and are fearful facebook is one step closer to requiring a fee for its services. However, I don’t agree with this view for many reasons. First, if facebook began to institute a monthly fee for it’s social network service, it would totally undermine the power and trustworthiness of Mark Zuckerberg, who has proclaimed, “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. Simply put: we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.” If he went back on this ardent declaration I think many users would be turned off and as a result potentially leave the site. Additionally, this bold step would open the door to competition that the facebook monopoly hasn’t yet seen. Many new free facebook-like social network sites would spring up and potentially attain all of facebook’s users. Thus, this motive of quick and easy profit would be the death of the most notable and lucrative social networking site in history.
Instead, I believe that facebook’s use of “promoting” posts is very clever. It taps into one’s facebook addiction/need to be heard/need to be the center of attention to gather more information about someone for possible advertisers. I don’t think facebook finds the $7 charge to be that attractive, rather the social information that you want plastered on everyone’s newsfeed is what appeals to facebook programmers. For example, if Sally Sue wants to “promote” her post: I just got engaged to Larry”, this information becomes even more apparent and readily available to facebook employees. This information could be used to charge advertisements for department stores with a wedding registry, potential venue locations, florists, and etc. Facebook doesn’t want to take your money directly; rather it desires to sell as much information as it can to advertisers.