Social media verification checkmarks are blue badges or circled checkmarks that indicate that an account is of public interest and is authentic. They can help users establish their personal brand, set themselves apart from spam and fan accounts, and avoid impersonation. However, social media platforms are now looking towards using paid verification systems to increase profits. Let’s go through the various paid social media verification options and how this may dilute the legitimacy of verification on these platforms.
Twitter Blue is a subscription service that allows users to verify their accounts using a mobile number and get a blue check mark for $7.99 per month on web or $9.99 per month for iPhone users. Twitter Blue also offers other features such as undo tweet, bookmark folders, reader mode, custom app icons, color themes, dedicated customer support, and ad-free articles. Users who were previously verified under the legacy verification criteria did not need to pay for Twitter Blue to keep their blue badge. However, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is indicating that legacy blue checkmark verified users will soon need to pay to keep their verification checkmark.
Facebook and Instagram
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is testing a monthly subscription service that allows users to verify their accounts for $11.99 per month on web and $14.99 per month on mobile. The service, called Meta Verified, will give users a blue badge along with several other benefits, such as increased visibility, protection against impersonation, priority customer support and more. Meta Verified also offers other benefits such as access to exclusive content, events, groups, stickers, filters, badges, insights, analytics, and monetization tools. The service will be available to a limited number of users in the US at first.
Our Take: You Will Soon Need to Pay for Your Verified Accounts
Pretty soon after Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter would remove all legacy blue checkmarks “in a few months,” influencers and celebrities quickly became vocal against paying for Twitter Blue. After the acquisition by Elon Musk, Twitter has been cash-strapped and a lot of these actions, including making legacy blue checkmark verified accounts to pay up seemed like an empty threat. Now that Meta is rolling out a similar structure for verification, we think it’s safe to assume that you’re going to see this verification process be pushed to all social media platforms including YouTube and Tiktok.
How This Affects Businesses
These paid verification systems may raise some questions about the value and meaning of verification on social media. Are they making verification more accessible or more exclusive? Are they enhancing trust or creating confusion? Are they rewarding quality or quantity? Are they serving users or platforms? While this is a major concern if you are an aspiring influencer, we don’t think that this is too much of a concern if you are a business owner. In fact, we believe that you should limit your social reliance and look at other marketing avenues like search engine optimization, voice search and more to provide customers with information about your business in ways that you have more control over. You may also see a drop in influencers reaching out to your business and trying to get sponsorships due to the pay to play nature that is starting to form up around the influencer industry.
The Pros and Cons of Paid Verification
There’s a lot of concerns they’re being presented regarding paid verification for social media platforms. It changes it from a review system that gives the social media platform’s users some trust in those verified accounts. Now account verification is being muddied by the fact that the account is paying for that verification. It could undermine the trust and credibility that verification was originally supposed to provide.
This Could be Beneficial for Aspiring Influencers
I do think there are some benefits or opportunities of paying for social media verification. A big benefit is that smaller influencers now can “pay to play” and have verification just like more established influencers. There’s also the situation where the social media platform needs bank info and other things like that if the social media provider is offering advertising payouts. Providing a paid verification system can expedite that process and take away a lot of the arcane rules regarding when an account can start getting creator payouts. Influencers already are paying money to the social media platforms through boost posts and other ad options to get more reach with their content, what makes this different?
Diluting the Meaning of Verification?
Some of the reasons for getting social media verification is that it can boost your credibility and trust with your audience, potentially attract new customers and build brand awareness, could increase your engagement reach and presence and could open you up to opportunities with collaborations of other verified accounts. A very valid counter argument is that users may stop seeing verification as a validity of importance, trust, or quality. If wildly successful, users could overlook verification checkmarks. if not successful, it could be a scarlet letter badge that ostracizes you from the social media platform.
What do you think about these paid verification systems? Do you think they are worth it? Do you think they are fair? Do you think they are ethical?
