Until natural language processing improves, only humans can tell what’s important. So Facebook today begins letting you pay to promote a friend’s posts and get them seen by more people. This will help critical posts bubble to the top of the feed, and let Facebook earn some money too. Even though Promoted Posts only go their audience the author set their privacy control to, not everyone might be excited about the feature.
Facebook began testing the ability to promote your own posts in May 2012 and rolled the feature out to the US in October. The option has enraged some people, making them feel like they’re being extorted to communicate with their friends. But there are real uses for Promoted Posts. If you’re raising money for a charity, looking for an apartment, or have a big announcement for your company, paying to force it into more people’s news feeds can actually be really valuable, and worth the $7 or so.
Now you can do the same for friends’ posts. When you see one you think deserves more attention, you can click the drop-down arrow next to a post to sponsor it, and it will reach a larger percentage of the original audience of the post. That means promoting a friend’s post won’t violate their privacy settings. However, you don’t need a friend’s permission to promote their posts. And depending on what they said, the extra eyeballs might not always be appreciated.
A gradual global roll-out for the feature is starting now, and it’s only available to people with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers.
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