This coming Monday, May 31st, the United States will commemorate Memorial Day with a long weekend, parades, barbecues and of course, white outfits. Better yet, the weather has promised to be ideal, at least here in the Northeast. However, did you know that this year, Memorial Day will share the limelight with another holiday? It’s true. May 31st is also Quit Facebook Day, at least for the 23, 384 Facebook users (as of this writing) who have committed to deleting their accounts come Monday.

Maybe you’ve heard about Facebook’s problems of late. Complaints about the social networking giant’s treatment of its users’ information have been brewing for a while, but hit a crescendo around April when CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be deepening its connections with partner sites—whatever that means. Consumer watchdog groups, members of Congress, and the Federal Trade Commission have all expressed concerns over Facebook’s privacy policies, or lack thereof. Recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policies, including cutting the number of settings from 50 to about 15, and reducing the number of pages users have to sift through from 7 to 3, have not satisfied the more vocal critics.

In addition to the bad PR, this whole privacy fiasco—and things like Quit Facebook Day—could spell money trouble down the road as well. The bulk of Facebook’s revenue comes in the form of advertising dollars. Advertisers love Facebook, and its 400 million global users. When a user creates a Facebook profile, information gets handed over to the site—and its partners. Yes, and you didn’t think anyone really cared that you like to travel, take long drives, and eat ham sandwiches, did you? Somewhere out there, however, is an advertiser that cares very much. It is this information that allows advertisers to easily break down users’ demographics and tailor their advertising—this gives them a huge ROI.

What Facebook has seemingly failed to do is find that happy medium between respecting its users and providing advertisers with useful information. If Facebook just hands over users’ information to the advertisers willy-nilly, then eventually people will stop using the site, and advertisers will move on to the next big thing. However, if Facebook overcompensates and becomes less advertiser-friendly, the same outcome will occur. If Facebook had just respected its users’ information from the very beginning,  advertisers wouldn’t have gotten used to having such free reign over their market. See? There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Of course, 23, 384 people out of 400 million isn’t likely to make a huge dent in Facebook’s wallet, but Quit Facebook Day could be a sign of a trend, and Facebook needs to learn to walk a razor-thin line between its commitments to its users and to its partners.

Lesson learned—know (and respect) thy audience.

Image from sdow.semanticweb.org

Tags: content marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, May 28th, 2010 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.