Facebook To Charge Users To “Promote” Content

For all those frequenting Facebook, the social networking website can now turn into a forum for promoting themselves as by paying a few bucks, people can now use the media for highlighting something they want to.

If you want more of your friends to see your funny one liner or personal announcement, pony up little cash and you will get more visibility. Although the price has not yet been fixed but Facebook already soft-launched its latest paid product ‘promoted posts’ yesterday as part of its effort to mop up more revenues,  charging users $7 to make their friends more likely to see their personal posts..

[quote]“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,” wrote Facebook’s Abhishek Doshi in a post announcing the test.[/quote]

For now, at least, the test is limited to people with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers.

Of course, Facebook controls the algorithm for what shows up in members’ News Feeds, and in theory should already be running it in a way that shows us just the most interesting content. But owning the News Feed also means they can make money off of it from marketers – and now from members.

The service echoes one that Facebook first rolled out in New Zealand right before its IPO.