Contrary to what the financial markets may lead you to believe, Bitcoin is not the currency of the internet. The true, and much more valuable online tender, is social engagement. More than ever, people are moving away from traditional media outlets and migrating online, with Instagram reaching 800 million monthly users and Facebook a staggering 2 billion. This is a trend and companies are taking note, shifting marketing dollars towards social media advertising from “traditional” online ads, whose effectiveness is being rapidly reduced by ad-blocking technology. According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook profits spiked in the second quarter of this year as they continued to see rapid growth in advertising on their platform.
But as companies like Facebook see record profits, their most popular users are starting to feel left out in the cold. Actor/Musician Nick Cannon, boasting almost 2 million Instagram followers, expressed his unhappiness with the social media company this week. “I wasn’t making no money from Instagram,” he said in an interview. “Instagram is making all this money, all these billions. They’re making so much money and we’re just offering our personal lives up.”
This is not an uncommon complaint. According to the team at Followback, there are millions of people that feel the same way. With tons of celebrities already signed up, Followback allows anyone to monetize the value that they already possess on social media by offering a method to directly get a piece of the advertising pie, like a social media ‘Task Rabbit’. In contrast to sponsored or promoted ads that Facebook and Instagram get paid for by advertisers, Followback users can get paid by anyone to follow, like a post, comment on a page or post a video/picture on the different social networks.
And why shouldn’t users get paid? Whether they are artists, musicians, athletes, models or bloggers, millions of people have painstakingly crafted their lives online, growing their virtual audience from scratch. The ability to have full control over monetizing what they created without any third-party assistance is the next logical step.
As social media engagement continues to grow, people are becoming more interested in hearing the voices of their online friends and trusted social media stars through follows, likes and comments. Media outlets like E! News and TMZ are following these interactions the same way they follow breaking stories. It has even given rise to companies like The Shade Room, which has built its business model on following popular engagement on social media. For those social media users who have a significant following and feel they can bring value to advertisers by performing social media tasks, companies like Followback can finally give them a platform to monetize their accounts and capture a share of online marketing revenues.