It seems every other day that Facebook is rolling out some new feature or other – from Graph Search to the latest thing – letting users pay to promote the posts of their friends.
What this means is you can help to push a friend’s post to the top of the news feed in your network. To do this, you will just need to click on the menu button at the top right corner of the post you want to promote. This feature is only for people with fewer than 5000 friends.
Facebook believes that people will use this new feature to promote events, charity fundraisers and similar activities. Also, people might pay to push a post to rent out someone’s apartment or sell an item.
Facebook knows that this sort of sharing could cause issues with privacy; this feature is allowing you to promote a photo or a status update that your friend shared. To tamp down these fears, Facebook states that the post only will be promoted to people who saw it originally. It cannot be shared with anyone outside of the network of the original poster.
Facebook first rolled out these promoted posts in October. Facebook encouraged people to promote announcements by paying $7 for each promotion. At this point, the reaction to the promote feature has been somewhat lackluster.
It remains to be seen how well this new feature will be embraced, but there is no doubt that Facebook is making big moves to become the dominant player online in many different areas….these days, even job recruiters are using Facebook. The social giant wants us to always turn to Facebook no matter what we need to do, and they seem to be having some success with that.