If you follow frugal blogs, surely you’ve seen in. “Sara Lee/Ritz/Kraft coupons” if you become a fan on Facebook (FB). Personally, I’ve fallen for it a few times. The rush of seeing that coupon on the screen, the whir of the printer as it creates something FOR FREE from mere ink and paper. Ahh, what a feeling! But then FB puts the kibosh on my little high when the company asks for access to all my friends’ profiles. Buzzkill! I always back out before hitting that crucial “allow” button.
I’m not the paranoid type. My information is all over the internet by this point. Google my name, and you come up with more than one page of hits (wo-hoo!). I’m okay with that, I still sleep well at night. But willfully exposing all my friends to that without their knowledge or permission? Hunh-uh. Maybe they’re particular about who knows what about them (if they are, they probably shouldn’t be on FB, but anyway…). Who am I to hand their heads over to the big corporations? To me, a free package of Oreo Cakesters isn’t worth that.
And don’t even get me started on Farmville…
How do you feel about Facebook? Do you FB? Do you troll for freebies? And share – if you’re on FB, how many pages are you a “fan” of?
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{ 6 comments }
I have enjoyed the benefits of “Facebook Freebies.” To get around the privacy issue, I created a separate account. The companies now get access to my dog’s information (sorry Buddy), not mine, and I get free stuff. Win-win!
This is a good solution…but technically against Facebook’s terms of service! That’s OK, I won’t tell…
I’m not on Facebook. I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of free stuff but I just don’t have the time to add Facebook to the mix.
I really hate hearing of a good freebie then finding out you HAVE to facebook, etc.. in order to get it. I don’t facebook, Twitter, or anything else like that. There are not nearly enough hours in my day for that stuff… lol!!
It depends on what you're using them for. If you're using Facebook to keep up with friends, and Twitter as a source of leads for your business, then they're very effective uses of your time. If, on the other hand, you're only feeding imaginary zoo creatures- well, yeah, it's a time waster!
I’m backing off of Facebook, slowly but surely. I use it to keep in touch with people, but that’s it- and I rarely allow access to applications that want to pull my data! Farmville- like you don’t get me started!
As a marketer, however (my day job), I’m a big fan of Facebook, because it helps build communities of people who are interested in your product. And I spend a lot of time as a consultant teaching people with local businesses how to leverage the power of a Facebook page to increase their business. Not to mention the fact that people *do* tend to like and buy what their friends like and buy- which doesn’t mean that I’d ever want a Facebook application to contact my friends for me!