Social networks have been all the rage for several years now – and by ‘all the rage’ I mean very expensive with a lot of interest from investors. Some people disagree, however, calling them ‘bubbles’ which really can’t offer viable ways to capitalize on their audiences. Primary sources of revenue for social networks are in-app purchases and advertisement, and there’s some controversy surrounding both these methods.
For example, Facebook was indirectly and directly accused of if not being directly involved in using bots for boosting advertisement effectiveness stats, then of at least not doing anything to weed out fake clicks which wastes advertisers’ money without providing any real users. A similar thing is happening in VK, Russia’s rival to Facebook. On one hand, it doubles as a massive streaming video website with lots of TV Shows and movies as well as a huge library of music content. On the other hand, some of this content is pirated and the social network is often targeted by copyright holders pressing legal action. So anyway, how can social networks earn money? Or encourage their users to spend money.
Anyway, back in 2012 Facebook launched a new service – it started offering direct purchases of real goods within the social network – as gifts for their friends. Gifts could be given with or without an occasion directly from someone's profile page. Back when this service just launched the built-in gift shop had a few hundred presents courtesy of participating companies: Starbucks, Magnolia Bakery, Happy Socks, Angry Birds – you know, whatever was hip and trendy at the time. The pricing is also quite variable - from 5 bucks to hundreds of dollars. Users chose a friend, clicked the gift button, typed in their message, chose a gift, chose if they wanted to pay immediately or after the friend accepted the gift and decided if they wanted this to be a public or private action. The recipient then immediately saw the notification and could open the virtual card, complete with the description of the gift they would soon receive and a prompt to provide the shipping address. In 2012 Facebook users also could add items to wishlists slash shopping lists by clicking ‘want’ button on some goods – they could purchase them by clicking ‘collect’. For one reason or the other the services failed to gain enough interest from either users, participating companies or both, and it has sunk into oblivion. Until now.
Facebook has introduced a new version of the purchasing service, now making the primary targets not users’ friends, but their liked pages. Administrators of business pages now can put a ‘buy it now’ button directly in their ads and regular posts alike. If an interested user clicks such a button they’re offered to purchase the item without leaving the social network – which, undoubtedly, is appreciated by both advertisers, who can increase their sales, and Facebook, which retains users, rather than having them leave the network to another page. As is the tradition, only a handful of American businesses are now participating in the trial run. Late June it was announced that Twitter was testing a similar service – some users have already noticed ‘buy it now’ buttons located on sponsored tweets.
