Facebook Nags Businesses to Promote Posts. Is this in our Steemit Future?
I saw an unusual window in the bottom left of Facebook just now. I'm used to seeing notifications to the right, but the left caught my attention. It was trying to get me to promote a post from our FoxyCart Facebook page. I was busy reading something, so I clicked the "x" in the top right corner and guess what?
It didn't close the window. Instead, Facebook took me to a completely different page with this popup:
Facebook, please. There aren't enough facepalms for your cheap tricks.
When I tried to close that window, I got this:
That made me feel like I was doing something wrong. Even after closing it, I didn't find myself back on the page I started with.
As a Facebook page admin (or as an individual, for that matter), you have no control over who sees your posts. Facebook controls everything. If you work hard to build a following and spend marketing dollars to get a bunch of likes and follows, you're still not in control. You then have to pay again or your posts won't be seen unless people specifically configure their notifications to put your posts first in their feed or send them a notice when you post. I've done this for some of my favorite pages like Futurism. They have almost 5 million followers now, but how many actually see their posts?
Which brings me to Steemit's future.
Will the promotions tab ever succeed? Will we eventually see promoted posts directly within our feed much like Twitter does?
As a business owner, I wouldn't really mind seeing this. I own the @foxycart account, but I haven't bothered to post anything there or do any promotions because I don't see them as very effective right now. How often do you check the promotions tab? I don't check it much, and I'm on Steemit quite a bit.
Most likely this is a chicken and egg problem. We need more users before advertising here makes sense for businesses. Large companies investing marketing dollars here or publishing blog content on the Steemit blockchain would bring more users, but not until they have a reason to do so.
Like it or not, money runs the world. I love free internet money as much as the next guy, but there's always someone paying the bills. So far it's been early investors, speculators, and bag holders pushing up the price of STEEM.
What do you think the future of promotions on Steemit will be?
It's difficult to balance the needs of advertisers and users. Their aims don't necessarily conflict, but usually do in practice.
But with Steem we upend the entire attention economy. So we have a freedom to operate here that others don't. Let's model this out:
Users want great content that's worth their attention.
Advertisers want access to users who could potentially give them money.
If we can construct a system (and I'm 100% certain we can) that brings value to both parties, then we've got our solution, and we've got a clear value proposition for holding Steem as well. These are discussions we should be having.
We don't necessarily have to implement this system after we finish designing it; Our focus must be on a great product and strong growth. But by having that system ready to go for the future, we're sending a signal to the community that we mean business, and that there are very strong, tangible reasons for holding Steem.
So please, by all means, keep thinking. Because promotions has a future on Steemit, we just have to decide what that looks like.
Thanks for chiming in, Mitchell. I agree we are in uncharted waters here and there's a great opportunity to do something new. I really hope the marketplace for SBD products gets built out at some point. Dan's original vision of world domination (boot strapping a currency to eventually have a bootstrapped marketplace) is what got me so excited about this place. We can create a new paradigm for peaceful, voluntary, mutually beneficial interactions without violence. It's a beautiful thing. :)
Yes, we're definitely going to h ave a lot of fun with all this.
So glad I deleted facebook 2-3 years ago. Kept the messenger just to keep contact with friends and never looked back.
Hopefully a lot of stuff that other sites are advertising now just better and less annoying and less intrusive.
Yes! I can imagine a future where machine learning AI analyzes the blockchain and our thousands of comments to show us exactly what we want to see. Of course, we'll also need the option to hide things we don't want to engage with even if it's what we "want to see."
It's that not seeing everything in my feed that finally turned me off to Facebook. It wasn't so much fan pages but friends' updates I wanted to see. And I wasn't... Unless I interacted with earlier posts by that individual. Well often I didn't, but I still wanted to see what they shared. My feed ended up only showing people who'd posted jokes or who I'd gotten into political arguments with. All my friends who shared mundane stuff that I wanted to see but not dwell on, I quit seeing their updates. And I simply didn't have the time to set up my feed exactly how I wanted it, only to have Facebook change it anyway. I hope Steemit keeps showing me everything the folks I follow post in my feed, and I hope eventually it will let me create more than one feed so I can organize what I see by topic or whatever. I hope Steemit provides some cool options like that, including advertising, but where the user is in control of his or her own account.
The value I get from social media networks comes from who I follow and engage with. Facebook makes it difficult, but they also have options to get notified or put some posts first. I've been doing that a lot more lately and it makes the whole experience much nicer. I see some posts from certain friends and family every time because of those settings.
Just a quick tip: You can change your News Feed preferences on Facebook to "Newest First," and it will show you everything.
Thanks! I will have to try that next time I'm on Facebook.
I very seldom check promotions either.
I'm on Steemit a LOT.
Me, on Steemit:
Interesting...I think the big socials, Facebook, Twitter and even Youtube could end up destroying themselves with censorship and ad policy etc.
I would imagine marketing from companies will absolutely be done in the Steem Ecosystem but not necessarily on Steemit. If Steem reaches it's goal of a suite of apps developed on the Steem blockchain, I would imagine there will be apps more conducive to current marketing strategies. Just my opinion.
That's a great point. There are so many options for this thing to continue evolving and changing based on the market needs.
Man, isn't Facebook advertising annoying? I can't post anything without it begging me to turn it into an advertisement. It's like, "you posted this cute picture of your dog - want to advertise it?"
I think Steemit needs a WAY bigger userbase to draw any real advertising. It just doesn't make sense with the size of the site right now.
Agreed.
superb article! made me think...
What about the quality of the advertasing? who will decide if porn is out of boundaries or for that matter: smoking, MC D, pukakola, etc...?
I believe thats a debate waiting to happen as soon as we get the first contract on the table!
namaste
Yep, that will certainly be a challenge. One of things I'd like to see Steemit do more of is allow for individual customizations. The profile data (image, url, small blurb, etc) is currently stored in a meta JSON on the blockchain for each account. I'd love to see that space used for more customizations of the steemit experience which might include preferences for the things you're describing.
Meanwhile I really need-want-desire to have total control over what i am advertised on I was actually thinking at the "steem board", once the userbase grows advertasing will become a natural thing but....
who will manage those contracts? Do Steem needs-wants to even touch some of that multi-allpowerful-worldwide company money? I mean, how do we help small companies to grow?, Do we say yes to redbull but no to coke? what about charities?
How and who will decide that is a BIG question?
In many ways, the proper, effective functioning of Steemit (and any truly decentralized, autonomous company) is also a process of reeducation for the human beings involved. It's a rediscovery of the beauty and order which can emerge from chaos. I see it as the embracing of voluntary interactions and no rulers. We'll have to rely on protocols and rules which are flexible enough to allow for peoples' needs to be met in some form of Nash equilibrium. It may sound impossible, crazy, or inefficient, but I think we're approaching a point in our technical history as a species where networks are more efficient and productive than hierarchies. There will no longer be ultimate deciders. There will be chaos and from that will emerge robustness, tools, and techniques for ensuring all stake holders are satisfied.
now, that´s a reply i will need all night to wonder upon.... (5:58 am here)
Advertising on Steemit should follow this rule: The user is in control and is compensated for the attention they choose give away.
I like this idea.
I agree. I was thinking how nice it would be to have an opt-in option to see promotional posts in your feed which you could then get a bit of a reward on. I get that burning SBD to @null has value, but I still think there's so much money in advertising that we could change this in the future to bring some of that money back to those who read the ads.
Another interesting idea would be to let them share in the rewards for the ad posts. If the ads are bad, they get low reward and people will not incentivized to opt in to see them. If the ads are really informative, entertaining, interesting, etc... they will get high rewards distributed to those who opt in.
The problem with this, of course, revolves around advanced game theory challenges and how any "pay to play" system can be gamed and drain the reward pool in a manner which will ultimately bring down the utility and value of the whole system. It's complicated stuff and many don't want to engage with the game theory side of it to find robust solutions.
It is complicated stuff, but we'll have top minds on it, top minds.
I wrote a post about this a few months ago https://steemit.com/steem/@snowflake/a-twitter-like-revenue-model-could-be-applied-to-steemit-busy
That's a great post. Thanks for sharing.
Perhaps a Google approach may work, have three promoted posts on top of every searched category followed by later posts. Has anyone seen the Brave browser, they are working on serving ads to the user based on browsing habits similar to what everyone else is doing but they also ad block annoying ads automatically. Snapchat recently started putting ads at the end of snaps, annoying if you ask me and they have a discovery section where ads go for 40k a pop. I check promoted ads on Steemit because I am interested in what Steemians are paying to promote, but yeah the days of targeting prospects for unrelated products is over, as a consumer I want to search and purchase everything else annoys me. Snapback @lucklight