MSM

Facebook Gets Serious About Politics

A little over a month ago, it was announced that Facebook and ABC News were teaming up to deliver ABC political content to facebook users via the US Politics application and I was pretty skeptical that the partnership would deliver any tangible benefit to users or that it would catch on beyond the die-hard political audience. I was hardly alone in this assessment: C|Net and AllFacebook.com both had posts pretty much on par with what I was thinking.

Well I logged into facebook yesterday (for the first time in over 48 hours…I was due for a fix) and at the top of my News Feed was a sponsored block promoting the upcoming ABC Presidential debates which are apparently being co-sponsored by facebook. I would expect a standard sponsored News Feed item that we have seen rolled out over the past few months that promote upcoming movies or sponsored groups for brands like Wal-Mart and Pepsi, but this new semi-module was one of those promotions that only shows up every few weeks that users actually have to delete from the home page, it is not part of the News Feed so it remains static on the page until you remove it.

This means that, at a minimum, the 18.4 million adult facebook users in the US have now seen the ad (provided they have logged in since it went up) and surely at least a few hundred thousand of them followed the link to the application page, which I must say is actually pretty well made. It seems to me that ABC is getting a pretty good deal partnering with facebook…and it also seems that facebook is showing everyone that it can be grown up too. It might not be quite to the level that YouTube is yet as far as politics goes, but with the recent studies about people’s responses to candidate’s profiles, facebook finally seems to be getting serious about impacting the political scene in America. You only have to look as far as the “1 Million Strong for ____” trend that has exploded on facebook over the past year to see that users have been pushing the envelope to their peers and now facebook is doing its best to educate the masses…if this keeps up, my earlier views on the real effect of social media may soon prove to be antiquated. I hope that is the case.

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