Facebook is hard at work testing ways to generate income in the wake of next week’s highly anticipated IPO. The good news about this for webmasters is that many of the monetization techniques that the social networking giant is trying are brand new, so they have two advantages. First, they’re bound to be noticed by users, at least for a while – which translates to greater exposure for those who utilize them.
The second reason that Facebook’s new marketing features are so advantageous for webmasters? They’re still new enough to be effective because spammers don’t have their hands on them yet. That’s why it’s important to keep an eye out for social trends as soon as they emerge.
A couple of days ago, Facebook announced that it may be rolling out a spanking new pay-to-use feature in which users can pay up to $2 to “Highlight” their status updates and bump the posts to the top of friends’ news feeds. If it becomes a regular part of the Facebook experience, the Highlight post feature would look a little something like this:
Crazy, right? The upcoming feature was first unearthed in a post on Stuff, a blog in New Zealand. According to the post, this Facebook feature is currently in the testing phase with a small number of users. A representative from Facebook stated that people who want to do things such as sell a car or promote an event could use the feature.
This sounds great in theory, but social media blogs around the ‘net have pointed out that this new feature would move Facebook dangerously close to Craigslist’s neighborhood. This is uncharted territory for Facebook, but given the fact that the online classified business did around $2.6 billion in revenue in 2011 alone, this may be a great way for the social network to up its game. Whether users like it will be another matter altogether.
For webmasters, here’s the rub: The Highlighted Post addition is just in testing, but if it’s launched, the feature would be a great inexpensive way to generate traffic to your site or blog and expand your brand. That is, if you have a large list of friends. If you don’t, you’d better get on that – you may not have much time before the new feature goes live. Remember that Facebook users become “ad blind” very quickly – so jump on this train before it leaves the station.
It’s worth noting that Facebook’s Brand Pages for businesses are designed to be indistinguishable from regular user pages. Facebook designed them like this on purpose. The site wants good content to rise to the top of news feeds regardless of its origin, which is good for those promoting websites – as long as the content on their sites is stellar enough for people to notice.