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Paid Facebook services or premium Facebook memberships may be the next logical step for the social network to seek other sources of revenue. Premium Facebook features could expand upon the basic feature set allowing paying Facebook users to do more with their profile or fan page. While it would be a great mistake for Facebook to restrict access to features already available to everyone, premium Facebook apps and other potential solutions to integrate paid memberships would be beneficial for many users. Below we’ve compiled a list of the top 10 premium Facebook features and services we think are worth pay money to access and utilize. Please share your comments with us and take a second or two to vote on your favorite ones in the list.
Hide all games/apps – I’m referring to the games/apps that I don’t have installed on my profile. Games and applications that friends use, not me, commonly overwhelm my FB news feed. It would be really useful to be able to block all Facebook games and apps that I don’t use. Of course you can already hide games/apps manually that appear in your feed but you have to do it one by one. If there was a simple box added my application settings or profile privacy page that I could check mark it would completely solve this issue.
Priority support – It’s practically impossible to speak with a live Facebook representative these days. If you ever encounter a problem with your profile, fan page, or group page, you’re just out of luck. People want great support for services that they use and they are willing to pay for it.
Remove the 5000 friends limit – Facebook currently limits the number of friends you can have at 5000. There are no such limits on other popular social networking sites like Twitter and many users would like to see Facebook remove this cap as well.
Remove ads for profiles and fan pages – Facebook ads appear on every single page throughout the site and they can be quite annoying to some users. Giving Facebook users the option to opt-out of the ads for a reasonable price won’t appeal to everyone but it would to some. This is perhaps even more pressing of an issue for fan page owners of privately held companies and non-profit organizations.
Better privacy – Facebook user privacy is a touchy subject for many. There’s a lot of wiggle room as to what Facebook can do with your personal data. Adding this option to a premium membership to prevent anyone from access your profile’s data would be an awesome feature. Thankfully, Facebook’s privacy policy is frequently updated in response to growing concerns its users have. Usually these policy updates are followed by updates to the user privacy settings page so users can change their own settings accordingly. For more information on adjusting your profile’s privacy settings, see the Facebook guide.
Improved management of fans – Fan page and group owners are limited to what they can do to with respect to managing fans. Adding extra features for a premium version of the fan page or group page would make a lot of sense. For example, it would be really helpful if you could provide an opt-in/out contact database within FB that syncs with all of your other fans/users/subscribers outside of Facebook. That way you could consolidate all Twitter followers, Facebook fans, RSS subscribers, etc.
E-commerce storefronts – We already have Facebook fan pages that are available for companies and websites to manage users so why not make Facebook stores available to merchants? With as many users and traffic that Facebook attracts it only makes sense to incorporate such an option. Some commercial entities and merchants would likely pay a minimal fee to have a store directly on Facebook.
File sharing – Many people use Facebook as a contact manager while others use it as their preferred point of contact. With that in mind, adding file sharing abilities to a premium Facebook membership would make it much easier for users in comparison to paying for an outside file sharing service and then importing all your contacts. The other added benefit is that it removes the need to invite the person you want to share files with to yet another service.
Ability to export data – Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to easily export all of the images and videos for which you’ve been tagged, friend contacts, and any other data attached to your personal profile? Many of these things can already be done but it is a painstaking task to gather it all manually. Ease of use features like these and other time saving solutions are worth paying for in my opinion.
Premium apps – Premium Facebook applications, like paid iPhone or Android apps, would provide extra features and benefits for users. This may be another way for Facebook to add on the extra features/services that some users would be willing to pay for. So instead of just paying a for a premium Facebook membership without any options, you could simply add on extra features/services al a carte via purchasing premium apps.
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I don’t pay much attention to ads on Fan pages but I agree that it would be nice if they were not there. However, if I don’t really see them then what does that say about the effectiveness of Facebook ads!?!
As the manager of several Facebook Fan pages (for business purposes), I would be willing to pay for the following: Improved management of fans (including ability to message fans such that it triggers an email like a group message), Remove ads for fan pages (as part of a larger feature package but not by itself), and E-commerce storefronts.
Regarding E-commerce storefronts, what I’d really like is expanded capabilities with FBML. I have already listed some of our products on an FBML tab on our Fan page but greater flexibility would be nice. A full fledged e-commerce storefront wouldn’t do much good unless it integrated with our existing fulfillment process.
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