Last year, we learned about a feature on Facebook (News - Alert) that allows users, mainly targeted toward businesses and brands, to promote their posts on the social network. Promoting a post helps increase the people a post reaches, highlighting it higher up on a news feed and for longer, similar to Twitter’s (News - Alert) promoted tweets and trends.
Now, Facebook is adding on to this feature by allowing users to promote friends’ posts for anywhere between $7 and $10.
“If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends,” the company said in an e-mailed statement.
“If your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in news feed and more people notice it.”
Image via Mashable
As with many Facebook features, privacy is a top concern when it comes to sharing users’ information, and especially when others have the ability to control and share that data. Promoted posts will only be visible to users permitted to see the original messages, so if the page for the person whose post you want to promote is set to only allow friends to view it, only more of their friends will be able to view it when you promote the post.
Facebook users must have less than 5,000 total friends and subscribers to access the feature. If your friend or page meets that condition, the drop-down arrow next to a post will have the option to sponsor it.
There hasn’t been much evidence of people promoting their own posts so far, but we might see more of the less-egotistical version of the highlighting feature in the future.