The Financial Times Turns to Facebook
The Financial Times is handing out FREE web subscriptions ( a $109 per year value) to college and grad students through an application on Facebook.
The FT says that more and more young readers are seeking FT.com's content for research. According to the publisher, "There is an increasing demand from university and MBA students for access to the FT's quality of insight. . .". By providing college students free access to their premium content, FT hopes to obtain a new generation of readers that will become life long subscibers.
The FT is hoping to use the viral nature and international reach of social networking to carve out their next generation subscribers. Evidently, those who install the application can share it with other friends (as long as they are college or grad students).
The FT is not the only publisher to make a move to Facebook. Evidently, the Wall Street Journal has already added an application that allows site users to share select articles from WSJ.com.
What do you think of this idea? As a college student have you seen these types of applications and do you use them? Do you think that this new media will help deliver a new generation of subscribers for either the FT of the WSJ?
posted by jjg5038 @ 6:49 PM
4 Comments
4 Comments:
I think that this is a genius idea. There have been so many times where I have been researching for a project or paper, and I come across a site that doesn't let me access information with out paying a subscription fee. I never want to do that so I move on. It definitely is opening it up to a new generation. By giving it to college kids for free, they will not be able to do without it once they are out of school. Thus, resulting in them purchasing a subscription. I haven't seen these facebook applications yet, but I am now going to keep an eye out for them.
Yes, it's a great way to reach out to college students and forge long lasting relationships. Current college students will obviously be the next generation of consumers, and targeting them is what a lot of big businesses are doing (eg. banks providing ATM services on college ids.)
This particular tie-up even increases the utility of Facebook as a portal.
In my opinion, this is a very creative way to reach a potential group of future customers. Students are always in need of different resources, such as magazines and newspapers, to get information from for schoolwork. And to reach them through such a popular medium such as facebook is definetely a good plan. The fact that students will be able to use The Financial Times in their college classes, which prepare them for their future careers, probably will give them the incentive to purchase the newspaper when they do get their jobs. In response to the question asked by jjg5038, I've seen applications but I don't think I've seen any like this that would benefit my learning. I think if I needed to use a resource like this, and knew that I could get it for no cost on facebook, I would obviously download the application. This is also a major help to students in their junior and senior years of college who are working on research projects and don't want to pay for resources, so I think many students will look to this newspaper as a great help and buy it in the future.
This is definitely a great new idea. There are so many times when working on projects that I need sources from online newspaper or journals that are unavailable to me unless I purchase a subscription. As a college student, we don't have to funds to buy new newspaper subscriptions for every research project that we have. Giving students access to the FT through facebook in an excellent opportunity for the paper to build a relationship with the students, their future audience. Students can familiarize themselves with the format and content of the paper and understand it as a quality publication before being required to purchase a subscription. Allowing the students to become comfortable with the paper and using it in their classwork will greatly encourage them to subscribe to the FT after they graduate and the facebook resource is no longer available to them.
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