February 3rd, 2009 - 4 Comments
FaceBook polls, the economy of free, and the offer of a prize…
FaceBook introduced polls you could pay for back in June 2007, but they then disappeared again completely – however there have been some rumblings of a return with reports of FaceBook demoing the polls recently.
As things stand, I think FaceBook polls, were they reintroduced, might be ignored by users, much as FaceBook ads are largely ignored. Filling in a poll is an invasion into the ‘freeness’ of Facebook – a price to be paid in one’s time for someone elses gain.
Would offering a potential reward mean the polls would be seen as further free stuff to be had, rather than a price to pay?
FaceBook Ads seemed like a great idea – you could target your ads specifically to age groups, locations, gender etc, but it turns out they’re not so great after all – click through rates tend to be very poor.
FaceBook ads are not going to be the revenue generator FaceBook had hoped for, they need to find another way to generate revenue from their huge userbase.
Could FaceBook be re-examining polls as a way to generate revenue?
The way it worked before was that one could pay to poll users with a multiple choice question which shows up in their feed when they log in. TechCrunch have a short article explaining more about how FaceBook polls worked when originallly introduced.
Now that the global economy is looking a little worse for wear the ‘freeconomics’ business models will be under a lot more pressure to find that pot of gold under that free rainbow, however when Chris Anderson wrote about free being the new economy he said “the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.” It’s known as the penny gap.
Free is the market FaceBook users have become accustomed to and filling in a poll may well turn out to be a price they are not willing to pay.
Whether this type of system would impact on the quality of the data would have to be assessed in some way, but what if you offered a possible reward to fill in the polls? Any user who fills in the poll is entered into a draw. Now you have gone from asking a price of your users to offering them more free stuff.
Rewards could be set by the companies who wish to do market research or could be handled by FaceBook on a larger scale where not every individual poll has a prize but rather groups of polls, or polls within a certain timeframe.
What do you think? Would you complete a poll in your FaceBook feed? Would you complete one if you might win something?
This post has been updated to fix inaccuracies caused by being a little trigger happy with the publish button and not paying attention to dates on articles when researching! The rumours of FaceBook polls returning may have been premature in any case, but I’m glad they got me thinking about this anyway 
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4 Responses to “FaceBook polls, the economy of free, and the offer of a prize…”
It will certainly be interesting to see how they do. I have yet to see one when I log on, looking forward to seeing my first one now
February 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm by Frank Prendergast
I remember the polls and they just looked liked adverts. I occasionally filled one out, but mostly ignored them.
I think there’s a trade-off to be had here. Why not have the paid-for versions, but with all the bells & whistles, then have a free version for everyone else, to help inject a little fun.
Mates could run daft polls, along with anyone else from small non-profit organizations, right up to commercial businesses, to poll potential and existing customers.
Facebook get to keep the data and add it to their social graph, everyone’s happy.
Simple!
February 4th, 2009 at 7:12 pm by Wayne Smallman (a.k.a. Octane on Twitter)
True, but how would you differentiate them? Limit the numbers perhaps? As in fun polls would only have up to 50 or 100 responses whereas commercial polls would really leverage the power of the huge userbase.
February 4th, 2009 at 11:05 pm by Frank Prendergast
I would do a poll if it was something related to what I was interested in based on my other choices on Facebook. And if I could win a prize I’d be inclined to do it even more. polls are easy, especially if they are Yes/No to 1 question. No big deal for people. Women’s magazines run them all the time.
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:22 am by Ciara Crossan