Earlier this month, the press reported that Twitter is planning to introduce a $1000 monthly fee for brands that want to keep their gold checkmarks. Arms were thrown in the air by social media marketers who saw this as far too steep a price, poor value and a potential problem for the viability of their job.

Twitter’s move started a trend and Meta’s platforms are now rolling out (nominal) charges for verification marks. I’m not going to get into the wisdom or chances of success of the schemes, but I do want to discuss the reaction from marketers, which was largely negative. This is the wrong reaction.

This charge is a good thing for social media marketers*.  Social channels can and should generate annual value equivalent to above the line campaigns. Any brand playing in social should aspire to achieve mass reach in their categories. For mass consumer brands, that’s a monthly earned reach in the millions and higher. In other words, a reach that has an equivalent advertising value of many thousands of pounds, multiplied by the additional attention earned reach comes with.

Of course, the challenges of actually achieving that are many. However, rather than adding to those challenges, the $1000 fee will help with them, thanks to some basic psychology. People value free things less than those they’ve paid for. Have a world-class violinist perform in the street and people will ignore them. Stick them in the Royal Albert Hall and charge £100+ a ticket and people will pay rapt attention.

Making the entry point $1000 per month will increase stakeholders’ perception of social media, not decrease it. One thing holding back social media marketing right now is this perception that it is “free” and therefore can be given to low-level, low-experience staff to have a go at. Worse still, their work is then mediated by people with little-to-no understanding of the medium (for brand consistency, TOV, QA, etc), smoothed off, pushed to the middle of the road and posted late.

Increasing the costs to take part will make more brands ensure the people using it are the ones who know what they are doing. It will attract more scrutiny on performance and effectiveness. More higher-ups will realise the value social can deliver. It will enable greater clarity on the techniques that work and those that don’t. It will reduce the amount of poor decisions that kill great ideas and protract the publishing process. It will reduce the amount of content created by other departments and handed off to the social team for posting.

All good social media marketers and agencies should look forward to the $1000 per month gold checkmark. Your jobs will become easier and your stars will rise. The only people who should fear it are the crap ones.

*Except the smaller businesses, for whom $1000 is a lot of money but then the checkmarks really aren’t as useful for them anyway.