Can’t Buy Me Love, But Friends for Sale

The Australian company uSocial is selling Facebook friends to corporate customers for marketing and advertising purposes. Not enough Facebook friends? Buy them [Reuters]. Now I agree that it can be difficult for brick-and-mortar businesses to generate a loyal online social media following. But that really is no excuse for transforming the truly social act of “friending” someone into a purely monetized, commercial relationship. To the contrary, Facebook’s advertising platform allows sponsors to target the audience they are looking for whether or not the individuals have “friended” the company.

Can't Buy Me Love

So the purpose of buying friends — which, to be fair, is really buying leads, because uSocial cannot guaranty that the members contacted will accept friend requests for its clients — is rather to inflate the perception of the company’s brand as socially popular. Want 5,000 More Facebook Friends? That’ll Be $654.30. Advertising audience is really secondary. That makes it not that much different from what goes on with grocery store shelf space, movie reviews and the like. It just is an order of magnitude more unseemly to do it in the context of a consensual social media setting.

Years ago (and soon again thanks to Beatles Rock Band), The Beatles sang that “money can’t buy me love.” Well, it is a sad reflection on where we’ve come as a society that, in the 21st century, money can buy you friends.