Paying for Facebook
Today we had a request to post something on the Scotcampus Facebook wall. Now as you’ll probably be aware posting events on Facebook walls belonging to people/organisations isn’t an uncommon means of promotion. Asking for permission to post an event on someone’s wall is equally uncommon – most people just whack it up. But this time things were a little different, we had someone offer us decent money in return for allowing them to post on our wall.
Before you alert the Facebook police, I can tell you that we politely declined the cash. Obviously we like cash and we especially like receiving cash in return for our youth marketing services. But is a Facebook wall really part of that service? Can or should our 4200 Facebook chums be monetised? How much is a Facebook friend worth? What sort of impact and return on investment would a simple wall post have?
Who knows?
We use our Facebook account mainly to keep in touch with our readers and Freshers’ Festival attendees. We’re also extremely selective about what wall-posts are allowed up for everyone to see. It really wouldn’t make any sense for us to start using our Facebook wall as a billet board for every pub, club, brand and event looking to target students.
However, were Facebook to charge you for an account but allow you to profit from it, could we actually make a decent bit of revenue through advertising services and events to our student friends and followers? Almost certainly.
The skewed perception of the value of Facebook as a marketing tool means that we’d definitely have clients willing to spend money to post a wall advert which 4200 students may or may or may not read. We’re also pretty certain that given the opportunity these same clients would probably prefer it over using our own direct, straight to inbox emailer which has 24,000 student email addresses.
We know Facebook can help businesses, it’s been a massive part of how we interact with students and even advertisers, but we’re also completely aware of its limitations. What concerns us is that too many media buyers and marketing coordinators used to more traditional means of promotion basically see Facebook as the beginning and end of how they communicate online.