14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is going the Twitter route and is testing an ad unit that allows users to "highlight" some of the posts, for money. It works in a very similar way to Promoted Tweets, highlighted posts will be seen by more of your friends, fans or followers, by keeping it in the news feed for longer, placing it higher and generally boosting its relevancy as far as the ranking algorithm is concerned.
To be clear, Facebook is just testing the feature and there are several versions in the wild. In one test, highlighting is free, presumably so Facebook can see just how much users want this feature. In other cases, it costs $2 to highlight a post.
"We're constantly testing new features across the site. This particular test is simply to gauge people's interest in this method of sharing with their friends," Facebook said, confirming the test.
The feature works like this, a user or a page admin can choose to pay to have one post highlighted. That post then gets preferential ranking and Facebook makes sure that more people see it than they'd normally would. Regularly, only 12 percent of your followers/friends would see any single post.
The post is shown for longer and higher, but it is otherwise indistinguishable, to the followers, from any of the other posts. This may be something Facebook is testing as well, whether to have the post blend in without informing users that it's been "highlighted" or making it stand out in some way, like paid search results have different color background.
The feature isn't even live yet and it's already "controversial." People are making all the arguments you'd expect, how this is going to be abused by "rich" users, how it's discriminating against honest, hard-working people who create wonderfully interesting posts but won't stand a chance against those that pay.
It's unwarranted. Paid search ads have been around for more than a decade and it hasn't destroyed search engines. What's more, Promoted Tweets, which are exactly like the new highlighted posts feature, haven't ruined Twitter, yet. If anything, the feature could prove a new revenue source for Facebook, one more original than display ads and app sales, if only barely so.