Facebook is experimenting with promoted posts for regular users

Oct 4, 2012 09:37 GMT  ·  By

Some people don't really care that much about Facebook. Some are quite interested in what they post, how their friends interact, the likes they get and so on. But everyone uses it of course.

Still, for the latter crowd, Facebook is once again experimenting with ways of getting paid to keep your wonderfully interesting post on top of people's News Feeds for longer than the algorithm would deem it necessary.

That is to say, you can now pay to promote your posts to your friends because, why wouldn't you want to. For a measly $7, €5.42 (in the US at least) you can now make sure your friends never miss out on the stuff you know for sure they wouldn't want to miss out on.

Facebook has been testing the feature for quite a while now, it's available in 20 countries at this point, but is now making it available in the US for the first time.

"Every day, news feed delivers your posts to your friends. Sometimes a particular friend might not notice your post, especially if a lot of their friends have been posting recently and your story isn’t near the top of their feed," Facebook explains.

"When you promote a post – whether it’s wedding photos, a garage sale, or big news – you bump it higher in news feed so your friends and subscribers are more likely to notice it," it adds.

See, explained this way, it doesn't sound cheesy at all. This new feature is available to regular users, i.e. people with up to 5,000 friends or subscribers. If you run a page or are a public profile, Facebook has more advanced ad tools for you.

Granted, there are occasions where you'd want to make sure your posts are seen. And, yes, simply making it possible to label posts as "important" without charging for it would invite abuse.

But this is still all about the money. Facebook getting $7 from a user means it will almost double its revenue for that user for the year. The site only makes a few dollars per user, per year, the most in the US.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

You can promote important posts on Facebook
You can then check out how many people saw the paid post
Open gallery