Facebook: Paying £££s to Seem Popular?

“It’s free and always will be”. This is the message that greets you on Facebook’s login page. It now appears that this message may to be amended to include the phrase “unless you want to artificially boost your popularity”.

Facebook are trialing a new feature where you pay a small sum of money to have your “important” posts be highlighted and remain higher in friends’ news feeds for longer. If this proves popular enough then it will be rolled out worldwide.

The question is would you be willing to pay for this? Facebook “Likes” should not equal self esteem. They shouldn’t, but we’ve all felt that little bit of excitement when one of our posts starts to rack up the numbers.

The chances are most people wouldn’t pay, but just think about the kinds of people who would. We all have that one friend (and in most cases far more than one) who constantly keeps us updated with the soap opera of their lives. Now these attention seekers are exactly the people that would be willing to pay a few pounds to make sure EVERYONE sees how horrible their ex has been to them, giving them the attention that they crave. Or that guy that you knew back in high school whose constantly promoting his band that you’ve never listened to and wants everyone to know where they’re gigging. Aren’t you all looking forward to that possibility? 

Also it seems questionable to now start monetising this addiction. And I do think that some people are addicted to social networking (I’m probably one of them). It seems that the past few years have been the free sample that our dealer Mark Zuckerberg gave us to get us all hooked on his product, and now we’re hooked our high is going to start costing us.

Could it though be useful for highlighting legitimately important posts? I rather think not. As anyone who posts about politics on Facebook has probably found these posts are never as popular as a post about spending ages using the wrong side of the cheese grater (my most liked status in recent memory). This lack of interest is not based on the invisibility of the post as most Facebookers are adept at finding what interests them, so having it sit at the top of peoples’ news feeds will only irritate, not motivate!

This highlights the final issue: content is king. Whether I think my cheese grating shenanigans is more interesting than politics doesn’t matter. If I post it on Facebook then it’s up to public opinion to judge that. Remove that control and it just opens up even greater possibilities for people to spam news feeds, again hurting Facebook as a whole.

But just remember there’s always Twitter or Google+, right?