Facebook finally has a plan on how to monetize its vast user base: according to the Telegraph, they will allow market research companies to poll Facebook users on various details of their personal life.
Yes, that means your sexual orientation, your interests, your habits - everything you ever did on Facebook will be up for grabs. And Facebook will be making a lot of money out of it. However, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.
The initiative is called Engagement Ads, and it was demonstrated at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Basically, it’s the next step in market research; instead of those boring telephone polls which most people don’t bother to answer anymore, now we’ll have Facebook polls, which are only slightly less annoying, but it’s still better than, say, Facebook just selling access to their database to market research people. The polls will merely show up in your feed; whether you want to answer them or not is up to you.
At first glance this is nothing special: polls, right? You have those on every site in existence. However, what Facebook can do, is precisely target certain demographics; for example, it can serve a poll only to Canadian girls between 20 and 25 years of age. Not everyone on Facebook gives their real details, but I’m guessing the percentage of users who answer truthfully when asked about name, age, residence, and other personal info, is high enough for Facebook to have a solid foundation for market research.
Once again, this proves that Facebook has a much better monetization strategy than competing social networks; as many have guessed, they’re methodically turning their user base into a huge marketing tool. Remind me again, why am I a part of all this? Ah, yeah: because Facebook is fun and addictive. That’s how you do it, folks.
I wonder what participation rates will be like. I think one of the reasons that so many advertisers on Facebook (many of them colleagues of mine) have reported such poor conversions is that the Facebook platform is so optimal for interacting with your personal network, many users are loath to do anything else -- such as pay attention to ads and then click on them. I suspect, then, that these polls might face a similar challenge.
Posted by: CT Moore | February 03, 2009 at 03:10 PM