Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon as some of my Facebook friends become engaged: a photo of the couple is displayed along with the story about the couple’s new “engaged” relationship status. It’s a subtle change but it’s a nice touch by Facebook as a photo always helps a story resonate with readers. The new engaged story update has appeared to come with the updated homepage design.
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Facebook can make or break relationships. All too often I’ve seen it do the latter and it while it sometimes ends long-term relationships, it’s much easier to have it kill your chances with a girl before you’ve even started the relationship. After date one, you are posting on her wall, commenting on her status, and sending her gifts. You may want to think twice about that next time buddy because you have just become Mr. Desperate and you can kiss her goodbye. Below are five ways guys end up messing up their chances with their crush on Facebook.
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Ilana Donna Arazie is a vlogger and blogger about love, technology and living your best life. Find her latest adventures at www.downtowndiary.com.
A girlfriend recently asked me to explain the concept of “poking” on Facebook. I told her that it meant that someone is flirting with her, of course. I mean, isn’t it obvious? Back in second grade, the boys would chase us around the room, grab, hit and poke us until we giggled so hard we had “accidents”. Or was that just me?
Either way, that was considered flirting back then and sadly, Facebook has given men online access to their old ways. However, recently a male of mine friend mentioned that his guy friend pokes him all the time, and that just killed that theory for me. Or did it?
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Last week AllFacebook has the opportunity to speak with Shayan Zadeh, the co-Founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, one of the leading Facebook dating applications. The company has recently surged to the number one position in terms of daily and monthly active users for any dating application. Many have attributed this growth to an aggressive user acquisition model. Whatever the reason for the growth, dating is clearly a hot item on Facebook, ranking it among social games in terms of user engagement.
If you are in the online dating industry then social platforms are most definitely on your radar. Many offer a completely free platform but Zoosk differs from most in that they use a freemium model, limiting things like “flirts” and messages, charging users for increased activity. Check out our interview with Shayan Zadeh below.
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This morning one of my readers sent me a screenshot of the advertisement pictured on the left. I wouldn’t exactly call it an “advertisement” but it appears to replace other ads that would have been placed on the right hand side of the Facebook interface. Currently the ad is titled “Friend Profile Preview” and it shows your friend’s picture, name, and their recent status updates.
Now why on earth would Facebook substitute precious advertising space to alert you to one of your friends? Honestly, I don’t think they would. Instead, I believe (which is as of yet unconfirmed) that Facebook is testing out an ad network for displaying personals. I’ve discussed with a number of friends the opportunity for personals ads on Facebook.
Imagine being able to target potential matches based on their profile. There is tons of data including the schools they went to (for instance if you only want to date Harvard grads), the interests they have, and numerous other data. Rather than having a cost per click (CPC), or cost per thousand impressions (CPM), you can have a cost per date (CPD)!
This is complete speculation though unfortunately. Perhaps Facebook is having inventory issues due to the struggling economy and decided to place other internal advertisements as filler. Typically the company would place advertisements for their own ad platform though and not substitute advertisements for friends.
As such, it’s difficult for me to rationalize any alternative reasons for Facebook to display profile previews of friends without the long-term goal of making it an alternative to the traditional “personals”; the dating ads that used to be popular in newspapers. Can you think of any other reason that Facebook would test this out? Honestly, I think this could be extremely popular.
Update
I just called the New York Times to find out their rates for personals ads, and they quoted $48 for one week, $72 for two weeks, and $96 for four weeks. That’s not a bad business and considering that the advertisements are not targeted, Facebook could be a great substitute.
Update from Facebook
Facebook sent us the following statement:
“Facebook is not offering personal ads on the site. The unit you noticed is a test running to a limited number of users that previews the profiles of a user’s friends. It is not a paid advertisement but surfaces friend information to help enable more sharing in more places on the site. Users are only shown profile previews of their confirmed friends and only see the information if they have access to it on a friend’s profile. Facebook will continue to be testing various versions of this preview and similar units, but it has not launched it widely on the site.”
This afternoon I got in a conversation with someone about the logistics of Facebook relationships. Recently I’ve met a variety of individuals that each have different policies on when they make a relationship official on Facebook and whether or not they ever do. Ultimately relationships are one of the most complicated things and with the rise of Facebook, it has become even more complicated.
If one person is into a relationship more than another and wants to make a relationship public as to “lock in” the other person, they may push for what amounts to a public announcement. Is there some sort of standards for Facebook relationships though? Do you have a standard that you follow? Personally, I prefer to keep all relationship information off of Facebook as I have professional contacts that are my “friend” on the site.
Other people I know actually state things such as “Is Complicated”. That doesn’t really sound like a position of strength from negotiating purposes though. Then again, successful relationships aren’t exactly negotiable, are they? Honestly this isn’t the relationship blog but I thought I’d mix it up a little and talk about Facebook relationship statuses. What standards do you follow?
