Want 5,000 More Facebook Friends? That'll Be $654.30
USocial Will Sell You Followers and Friends — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — If you're a Gmail user who also happens to use Twitter, it's probably been about five minutes since you've seen an ad promising to boost your follower count.
Context & Ripple Effects
USocial's $654.30 price tag for 5,000 Facebook friends lands just as the audience it courts has never been bigger or more monetizable: Twitter reached more than 44.5 million worldwide users as of June 2009, and the service began selling premium commercial accounts with analytics in August — meaning platform-sanctioned ways to grow a following are arriving at exactly the moment a gray market offers to shortcut them. The ads themselves are aimed where attention is cheap to buy: Gmail, which passed AOL Email as the third-largest U.S. webmail service per comScore in August, serving promises of follower boosts to Twitter's expanding user base.
There is also precedent on the other side of the transaction: as far back as December 2007, Facebook members were selling their own ad space, so the idea of putting a price on one's social presence is not new — what USocial adds is a turnkey service that manufactures the presence itself rather than renting out an existing one.
First-order effects
- Buyers get larger friend and follower counts without any corresponding real audience, immediately inflating their apparent reach while diluting the signal value of every count on Facebook and Twitter.
Second-order effects
- Twitter's newly launched paid commercial accounts — pitched on detailed analytics — now have to differentiate genuine audience-building from USocial-style purchased followings, since both compete for the same brand budgets; meanwhile advertisers evaluating follower counts as a buying signal face systematically inflated numbers.
Third-order effects
- If friend and follower totals become a purchasable commodity, platforms are pushed toward metrics that resist fabrication — engagement, verification, sanctioned promotion products — as the basis for pricing social influence, a shift that favors whoever controls the official graph over third-party resellers.
The trend: Social-graph metrics are splitting into two markets — official platform products that sell reach and a gray market that counterfeits it — forcing platforms to rebuild trust into their counting.