The Cost To 'Promote' a Facebook Post: $200 To $500
nonprofiteer writes "There's been talk in recent months of Facebook's 'promoted posts' option. In beta testing, it cost about $5-10 dollars to get more of your friends/fans to see your posts in news feeds. Now that it's live, it's a bit more expensive, at least for those with big followings. On the Forbes Facebook page, the cost ranges from $200 to $500 to get from 50,000 to 250,000 people to see a given post. Another lame attempt at monetization, or will Facebook users actually pony up?"
This is what happens when everyone stops using RSS/Atom for syndication.
Many firms have publicly stated they were pulling from facebook ads because of lack or return on investment and intensive bot clicking.
Tomorrow is another day...
To get first post. Perhaps I should have paid more?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Blasting it out indiscriminately, like spammers do, has a very low conversion rate. It looks like Facebook is going for a more targeted model based on what it can gleam from user profiles. But it all comes down to cost per conversion. $500 could be cheap, if your post is promoted to the right audience. This remains to be proven, of course. But I wouldn't automatically say that the price is too high.
The writing was on the wall. Everyone saw it coming since FB decided to monetize the site with FB credits, in-app purchases, etc.
Next: for a premium fee, select customers (i.e. advertisers) will be able to publish "stories" (i.e. ads) on everyone's wall, regardless of friendship status.
For a super premium fee, they'll be unblockable.
$500 to promote a post? Of course companies will pony up.
At that rate, $30,000 will get you 60 promoted posts. Say you post twice a day -- and we're assuming that you're not just posting the same thing over and over, here, but you have an actual strategy. $30,000 buys you an ad campaign that lasts an entire month.
Depending how you play it, it beats an ad in a magazine, which could easily run you $30,000 (or more).
Breakfast served all day!
Well I called FB stock at 10$ by the end of the year. Let's see if I hit the nail on the head.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
The trouble with shorting is that you have to be confident about both the equilibrium state and the trajectory...
Predicting that Facebook is presently hilariously over-valued is easy(and likely correct); but predicting how fast shareholders will give up holding on to hope and/or hype is a great deal trickier.
Facebook has a fundamental issue. It has allowed/encouraged users to build a large 'friend' list. This inevitably means that users get overwhelmed; so Facebook does some analysis and tries to cut the chaff and guess what you don't care about seeing. The problem is that with it's tight one size fits all friends model it has a good chance of hiding stuff I do want to see.
We were almost reaching the point where it was normal to announce big events like weddings etc on your wall. Now the people who may have done this are likely going to rely on other communication forms that they know will reach everyone.
Check out, and take time to explore, http://www.rssowl.org/
You get an overview of ALL stuff from ALL feeds, or just from invididual categories/feeds you selected (which acts recursively, which is awesome).
Google Reader is a JOKE.
Plus, it's Google, so wtf is wrong with people anyway :P Isn't it enough they have web analytics on every site of the planet, and that that half of the feeds go through feedburner on top of that? Why not at least read the other half of the feeds in peace... ? I don't even read any feeds that are controversial in the slightest, it's mostly webdev stuff, but still, I have principles :/
Here is what's happening right now. Investors are not happy with poor performance and they are demanding more money. This idea was on a backburner probably for a while, but now that FB is showing not as profitable as they thought it would, they are trying this. They have dozens of other similar ones if this one works. This whole company has this one "product" and nobody saw the risk in that? It was a trendy thing to do, for a while, now it's less trendy, and in 10 years it won't be trendy. Don't get me wrong, I see the value in social networking: stay in touch with friends and family, creep on some hotties every once in a while, maybe read an interesting post here and there. But it has become the biggest shouting match in the world, and it's all nonsense. I don't even notice the ads any more. If somebody is posting too much and it becomes annoying I block their posts. You pay 500$ so your posts come up more often - I will block you. You pay more - I will remove you from my friends. You override that and I will stop using FB altogether.
I think I disagree, Facebook might be different. Enough raw time has passed so that everyone has at least heard that "it's okay for normal housewives to be on Facebook", whereas I think what did Myspace in was the attempt to be edgy with the Under-25 crowd and bands.
So I think Facebook is becoming the Lock-In of Ordinary Family social media, and if indeed something topples them, it will be business news in the making.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hmm. I think I've heard this comment before. Usenet, then dialup hubs, then "blogging", then forums, each used to be in this position. They still exist. Yes, these populations were tech savvy and FB is drop-dead easy, but the next product will have to be even easier.
I can't predict the future, but FB will leak members as the market fragments. Something will eclipse them entirely for it's core featureset, eventually. There's no way commercial companies can compete with the try-anything openness of the general web. Whatever does, it will have to (at least initially) tie-in to FB to bridge the gap. FB itself would dislike this but they may have no choice. Behold the Age of Social-Dashboards.