What if social was expensive?

One of the best things about social media is that it's free. You pay for your internet bill and then you can do whatever you like online without spending another penny. Things that otherwise would cost you a fairly decent chunk of cash are yours for just the price of your time on social which makes it a brilliant place to launch your career, sell a book or run a huge international marketing campaign. It's mad skills, basically. The world is your oyster.

But would it be such mad skills (that means good, sorry, I'll stop saying it now) if you did have to pay? As Facebook continues to introduce new and ever more irritating ways of trying to convince you to part with your money I'm going to imagine a dark, scary, intimidating world where social media is expensive for advertisers. I'm doing this for you, remember, so if I end up having a nervous breakdown I expect you to visit often.

ENTER A WORLD WHERE SOCIAL MEDIA NEEDS SOCIAL SPENDING

It's not quite the end of the world, but it might feel like it.

Twitter is effectively giving brands and businesses the opportunity to shout any message out to any person at any time of the day. It's the online, modern equivalent of hiring some space in a newspaper or running a block of ad space on Teletext. At the moment it's completely free, unless you want to promote a Tweet (Don't do it. Never do it.) but imagine if that wasn't the case. Let's say it would cost you £100 per tweet, the average price for a small press ad in a decent sized paper. In this tweet you could put the normal 140 characters and a picture of your choice, which of course could be a poster containing as many other words as you like. Would it be worth it?

Probably, yes. If the general public could still use the site for free then your message would still be seen by potentially thousands of people. If you did it well then it would also be shared with thousands more, far exceeding the reach of any newspaper ad or radio commercial. Of course the downside would be that it would cost you whenever you wanted to talk about this ad again, but if the initial tweet did well it would limit the need for you to do this. 

YouTube is like an online, never ending version of a cheaply made Sky Plus. You can watch anything you like, including a lot of TV shows and even some films, without spending any money or buying any fancy set top device. This makes it a really good place to advertise. By that I don't mean putting the little banner ads over the top of other videos, because that's a really BAD place to advertise and I'm only ever going to ignore that while quickly looking for a way to get rid of it. But I do mean actually uploading your ads to the site as a video. Lots of brands do this and get lots of views as a result as it also allows them to link the video to their other social channels. But what if YouTube charged for this? 

Let's think about how much it costs to air a TV ad. I'm going to say around £50,000 for a mid-range network commercial. Put that next to your YouTube upload and it seems ridiculous, right? But in reality it shouldn't. Your video has the potential to be seen by huge amounts of people and reach an audience that may never watch the TV channel you'd air on. 50k for that sort of publicity is cheap.

Now for Facebook. Zuckerberg already offers you the chance to pay to advertise, but he's not forcing you into it. You can set up and run a beautiful branded page for no money at all and only have to part with the pounds if you want one of those nasty little ads to run at the side of the newsfeed.

How would it work out if you had to spend to make a brand page? Your content can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people and shared to all corners of the world. Fans can engage with you in a totally unique way so I can't really compare it to any other form of paid advertising. So I'm going to stick a random figure on it of around 20k a year. This would buy you the rights to put any content online you liked and let you run those timeline ads too. You'd basically be running a full page, fully interactive magazine spread every day that could be seen by far more people than any glossy ad could manage. Bargain, ey?

When you think about it, back in the real, free world, you're getting an absolute steal. You get all this amazing potential coverage for nothing at all and all you have to do is be a bit smart to make the most of it. 

Instead of putting all your creative thought into the paid advertising options, you should really be putting it into the free social alternatives. 

Don't waste the opportunity.