I've been noticing these a lot recently, and I think the algorithm needs a lot of work because these companies can essentially be paying to damage their brands. When I see "So-and-so likes X" at the top of my feed every day, I get annoyed, and I instinctively direct my ire at the advertiser (or worse, my friend) rather than Facebook. I've seen a bunch of comments like "why do you keep posting this shit," and the reply is of course "I don't know, I'm not doing anything!"
I mean, even the first time I see one of those ads, the whole thing just rings cheap, and I dislike that my friends (and possibly myself) are unwittingly participating in these ad campaigns. It really doesn't seem like effective marketing (but I'm no guru, maybe getting the impressions turns out to outweigh the annoyance?).
I wish this article had continued to the conclusion of "what if I put very negative or outright offensive text in my sharing of this page, which could then be propagated as an ad?"
This. I recently paid a small amount to advertise my app (promoted post) on Facebook and while I was pleased at the number of likes, comments and impressions, there were a disproportionate number of comments yelling in all caps for me to stop spamming their newsfeed.
The thing is, despite it being "pretty good business" it is not what most people want from Facebook. Facebook's "good business" practices are basically conflicting (inverse relationship) with the quality and usefulness of the product from the user's perspective.
That is the big difference and why people are complaining that Facebook is too much noise, because everyone goes there just to see what their friends are up to - not what they just bought on amazon.
The perfect product is one where the company's monetary interests are aligned with the user's experience. By offering the user something they want, they mutually benefit and make money. That is just not the case, at least for what I personally want from Facebook.
As I understand it, for this to work, Amazon (to use the author's example) would have to be paying Facebook specifically to show these domain sponsored stories. The author is essentially leveraging off Amazon's advertising budget, correct?
This is pretty much the same method a user can use to provide a negative comment using the Like Button comment feature on a company, though actually a lot worse and a bit more annoying. This also appears in "X is posting about Y" which I wrote about a while back [1], grinds my gears really.
The ad push is more aggressive than I am comfortable with
On the flip side, because how these sponsored stories/posts work, if you are able to chain together an exploit with either click-jacking or otherwise you can get a pretty decent worm [2] going using their very own sponsored stories feature against them.
So you could send out amazon links to products with your referral id, have amazon pay facebook to pin it to the top of people's news feeds, and cash in if anyone buys something from amazon after visiting your link? :)
I mean, even the first time I see one of those ads, the whole thing just rings cheap, and I dislike that my friends (and possibly myself) are unwittingly participating in these ad campaigns. It really doesn't seem like effective marketing (but I'm no guru, maybe getting the impressions turns out to outweigh the annoyance?).
I wish this article had continued to the conclusion of "what if I put very negative or outright offensive text in my sharing of this page, which could then be propagated as an ad?"