In a continued effort to be more like Twitter, Facebook (META) is offering incentives to a bunch of random kind-of-celebs to participate in a “WatchWith” party during the Super Bowl. Basically, besides seeing all your friends’ annoying updates, you’ll also get to learn what, say, random actor Josh Duhamel, or a bunch of athletes (what are they?) think of the game.
According to a letter obtained by Re/code, Facebook is asking the chosen celebs to post five to ten fun pieces of Super Bowl commentary in exchange for lots of juicy publicity.
Some specific posting suggestions include “Pre-game photo of your viewing party,” “Commentary on performance by National Anthem singer and/or Bruno Mars at Halftime” and “Commentary on funny SB commercials.” We hope they don’t ask Mr. Duhamel to rank Bruno Mars’s performance against the Black Eyed Peas’.
In exchange, Facebook will provide “Amplified distribution on posts to your current FB Page fans via our internal organic and ad credit tools,” which means…something. Facebook also promises “Exposure to new FB fans” and “Exclusive access to new FB Pages app to facilitate the posting via mobile and enable fan engagement,” which we’re sure all the celebs are super excited to download.
As Re/code notes, it’s kind of weird that Facebook feels it’s necessary to offer all these incentives; does that mean its billion users somehow aren’t incentive enough? Are you feeling insecure, Facebook?
And on our part, we don’t even like seeing our closest friends’ musings on Facebook, so we’re definitely not interested in knowing what a CNN anchor and a bunch of “sports players” are saying about the Super Bowl. And—sorry Facebook—if we’re really itching to know what famous people are saying about the game (in the hypothetical situation in which we understand how football works), we’ll check Twitter.