Fox - Facebook wants you to advertise … to your friends. The world’s largest social network, which announced Thursday that it has crossed the billion-user mark, has struggled to make money from its enormous pool of users. The solution: Turning individual users into advertisers...Facebook announced Wednesday that Joe Sixpack will soon be able to ensure that you're reading his messages, thanks to an expansion of the Promoted Posts program, which lets businesses pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Facebookers see your posts. “As part of a test starting today, people in the U.S. can promote personal posts to their friends on Facebook,” explained Abhishek Doshi, a software engineer, on Facebook’s website. “When you promote a post -- whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news -- you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it.”..Facebook announced Wednesday that Joe Sixpack will soon be able to ensure that you're reading his messages, thanks to an expansion of the Promoted Posts program, which lets businesses pay anywhere from a few dollars to a few thousand to ensure that hundreds of thousands of Facebookers see your posts. “As part of a test starting today, people in the U.S. can promote personal posts to their friends on Facebook,” explained Abhishek Doshi, a software engineer, on Facebook’s website. “When you promote a post -- whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news -- you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it.”
Ok, I'm not going to get all dramatic and say that if you do this I'll un-friend you, I'm not going to bitch about the fact that on top of having to wade through countless advertisements for Tide Detergent and Duracell batteries every time I log on to Facebook just to see what my fake internet friends are up to, I'm now going to have to add advertisements specifically from those fake internet friends for garage sales, craigslist adds, and awesome pictures of what they had for dinner...I'm fine with all that.
I'm just going to say, if you're one of these people who feels the need to pay Facebook to ensure people see your post/status update/picture of food...You really need to look in the mirror and take stock of your life. Really think about what that's saying about you. You're basically paying to advertise the fact that not only do you assume internet strangers and fake friends who, by logging into Facebook, are admitting they've got nothing better to do than to kill time and look for gossip fodder, aren't going to find you interesting enough to pay attention to...But that also your real friends have so little interest in what's going on in your life (or what you purport to be your life through phony updates) that they're just going to skim right by your updates. That's what you're saying.
So if you're at that point, I'd say paying $7 for a post that says "Little Caroline's First Poop on the Potty!", shouldn't be your top priority. Maybe getting out and seeing some real people, or a shrink perhaps. At the very least pick up the phone and talk to an actual human voice. Because when you're at the point where you're literally paying for the lowest form of human contact imaginable, the "Like", that's when you know you really need help.
