How Facebook Exploits Its Users for Financial Gain

Facebook is the biggest social media platform with more than a billion users worldwide. If you don’t know about the social media platform you have been living under a rock over the last few years. It is an innovative tool you can use to stay in touch with your family and friends but it is also addictive and many users worry about their privacy. When you use the site you should also keep in mind that Facebook is a business and they are in it for the money. Of course they provide you with some awesome free services, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch!

Here is a list of services the social media site offers, or wants to offer in the future, to make more money:

Paid Promoted Posts for Page Admins:

First, there is a way Facebook makes money from small and medium sized companies. If you own a company you can promote your posts to reach more of your page’s fans. The wider you want your message or ad to spread, the more you need to pay. Facebook created a new button on the page composer to do this. It is a simple and useful option but also an easy way for Facebook to make money.

The One Dollar Messaging Service:

Then there is the notorious dollar message. FB engineers are busy launching a number of new paid applications. Last December the social media site started charging users a one time fee of one dollar if they sent a message to someone who is not in their friends list. The recipient has the option to choose if the message is spam and move it to ‘other tab’. If the message has been marked as spam the sender will not be able to send any messages afterwards. If the message is not marked as spam, the recipient gives the sender the opportunity to keep sending messages. According to Facebook this new feature is only a test in the United States to decrease spam. In the time before the test the message would have just gone to the recipient’s ‘other’ tab, next to the ‘inbox’.

Games:

Everybody has seen the games you can play on the site. You can send requests to your friends to play games such as Farm Ville, Candy Crush Saga or Texas HoldEm Poker with them. Joining these games is free. If you want a flying start in the game however, you can choose to pay Facebook with your real money. Many of these games are quite addictive so a large number of people end up spending hard earned cash, for a silly game on the internet!

Facebook Gifts Feature:
Last year the new feature Facebook Gifts was unwrapped. This service allows members to send gifts to friends via their profiles. You can also swap gifts with friends. More than 100 companies are participating in the service. For the moment this feature is only available to a random slice of users in the United States but it is to be expected to go global so that Facebook can make money out of the gifts you send to your friends too.

This was a list of new features Facebook has brought its users lately and you can expect more to come. A user’s fee? Pay as you post? A dollar a picture? Who knows what’s in the pipeline? To be continued!

Rens van der Windt

This guest post is written by Rens van der Windt, a digital marketing executive from London. One of his clients is Intralinks more than a VDR, a virtual data room and dealroom provider.