Facebook: Don’t Sell Credits, Let Top Users Trickle Down the Wealth

Facebook is so worried about Twitter that they are creating monetary incentives to keep people on Facebook to check their statuses.  Mashable provides great coverage, as always:

Facebook Credits seem to (be) Facebook’s baby steps into the world of virtual currency. Right now, users can only give credits to friends for sharing great posts or having a status people like. However, it isn’t a far stretch for credits to be the medium in which people pay for things on Facebook applications or even pay for things on other websites via Facebook Connect. Imagine connecting to Amazon and buying a new mouse with a couple thousand credits.

But seriously, will anyone buy these to give to their friends?  Facebook has struggled with monetization of gifts for friends, and this is no time for users, particularly in Facebook’s demographic, to be spending money frivolously.

Rather than paying for credits, which seems to be unrealistic, Facebook should study its data to find the best creators of content and provide them with free credits to get the virutal economy in information rolling.  Giving credits to the best content creators will allow them to “trickle-down” the credits to those they recognize as providing great content.

Great Content Recognizes Great Content

• We can safely assume that Facebook knows more about us than our actual friends do.  Facebook should mine their data to find the users who share the most links, that are most commented/liked, and that are re-shared with others.
• Users who can create good content are more fitted to recognize great content than users with money to burn.  Having good users recognize content increase the value to Facebook for that recognition.

Let Great Content Providers Trickle-Down the Facebook Wealth

• Selling Facebook Credits will put power in the hands of those with wealth; this conflicts with a basic principle of Social Media, let the users determine what is good content.
• Good content creators can give credits to other good creators who will then do the same continue to “spread the wealth”.  Sound like socialism?  Well, it’s actually more like the theory behind Trickle-Down economics.

Existing creators of good content rewarding others who can create good content will provide Facebook with much more relevant, and therefore more financially valuable, data.  By selling the credits, not only will the program look silly and likely fail, the data created by the program would not be as valuable as allowing the best users to highlight where others are doing the right thing.

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