Facebook Friends For Sale: This Time It’s Not a Game
Jennifer van Grove talks about an interesting business: uSocial, a company that has previously made money by selling Twitter followers, is now selling Facebook friends - you can buy them in packages of 1,000 up to 10,000 followers.
[...] "Why buy Facebook buddies? According to the company, “every Facebook fan or friend you have is generally worth $1 to you per month, which is a figure anyone using this site correctly can back up. This means that even on a purchase of a 1,000 friend pack, you will not only return your investment in the first month, but earn more than five times what you’ve invested. Try and tell us that’s not a great investment.”" [...]
There's of course a lot of controversy around this. Aside from the fact that I would feel horrible for buying "friends", I doubt those kinds of friends would be worth the money from a business perspective either. What's your opinion?
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Gosh silly me...
.. here I am DELETING people from my Twitter followers group and declining to connect to people on Facebook or LinkedIn. Just because I don't know them and they say wierd things in their statuses and have strange photos, and I don't want to ever meet them. Wish I'd known I could just give them to USocial and everyone would be happy. They could then rent them out to other people for $1/month.
Does anybody else use LinkedIn or Facebook to remember contact details for people they actually met or interacted with at some time? Or is this entire social media thing an extended adolescent game about who is Mr/Ms Popularity?
Out with popularity and the social networking gaming of friends
Hi Matt,
This topic makes my blood boil! We were only discussing this at lunch yesterday where people who either make a game of collecting 'friends' on social networks or connect to people they wouldn't know from a bar of soap devalue the entire network.
One colleague shared..
"I reached out to one of my contacts who was connected to a person I wanted to connect with and she said that she didn't even know who he was.."
Back in my XING days, I remember some members who paid people to connect with other members before XING placed a limit on how many connections you could make daily or before people accepted your request.
As for the USocial offering - let the piranhas feast on each other.
I've always maintained a strict rule around who I connect with on all platforms - I must admit it doesn't feel great to not accept a connection from a seemingly nice person who has no relevance what-so-ever to you... but you gotta draw the line somewhere.
:-) Maria
Hi everyone, when I added
Hi everyone,
when I added this article to our resource section, I mentioned that I doubt the monetary value they are proposing - Marshall Sponder did his own calculations on the value of friends, see here:
http://www.themoderatorcommunity.com/resources/are-your-facebook-friends...
His result: not $1 per month, but $0.04!
In any case, I'm also one to deny contact requests if I really don't know someone. It surprises me that some people send contact requests in places like LinkedIn or XING when they absolutely don't know you, and then don't even add a message of why they'd like to connect. The value of these types of contacts? $0.00 in my opinion. Because all they are is a link from my profile to theirs - they are not contacts, they are links.
But if people are paying for random contacts... Matt, maybe we should start a friend rental service?
Edwina
Business wise - not a good ROI
Hi everyone,
This idea stems form an old-school marketing system. It's just another way of direct mailing. However, direct mailing has proven again and again as a bad investment if you don't target your audience and if you don't bring them into your circle of trust.
No body is going to buy anything from you if they are not in your circle of trust. Buying so called "friends" does not make them go into your circle of trust. You'll have to first work and make them truly your friends before you'd be able to market them anything.
Therefore I don't see a long-life for this method. Even the so-called twitter followers that are generated by automatic machines and scripts are also deleting automatically those that do not follow you after 48 hours, which means that they are not interested in what you offer.
Although I personally hate the thought that someone would sell me as a friend to someone who I don't know I also know that the minute I will receive something that is not interesting for me I will delete them.
In the long run (and in that sense in the social media very short time) I don't see the success of this strategy from pure business point of view.
On the other hand I like Matt's idea - selling those connections that I hate and earning money on those that do not support me. Maybe someone else can benefit from them or they could benefit from others.
Have a magical day! Vered
We Respect Your Privacy...Well, Too A Limit
As much as it pains me, I read the Terms of Service (TOS). Usually, by the time I finish I wish I had a team of attorneys I could turn to and say, “Should I be worried about any of this?”
Have you ever landed on a landing page and read how everyone respects your privacy and the promise never to sell your private information to any third party? Isn’t there some underlying reason for that? There will always be those who capitalize on the numbers game.
I wonder how uSocial’s TOS reads.
david c ballard
CyberHood Watch
CHWradio