Facebook Promoted Posts Launches In The US

Starting today, Facebook users in the US will be able to catapult their personal posts to the top of their friends’ timelines using the social network’s promoted posts feature.

Narcissistic users will be able to pay around $7 (£4.34) to take advantage of the new initiative, which has been rolled out in more than 20 countries to date.

Businesses can already promote posts from their pages to subscribers on Facebook as part of a separate project launched last May.

Facebook promoted posts

“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,” explained Abhisek Doshi, a software engineer at Facebook. “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.”

Once a post has been promoted, users will be able to see just how many of their friends have noticed it – perfect if you want to let everyone know what you had for lunch. The test is available to people who have fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers.

Promoted posts were first launched in May in New Zealand as an experiment to see just how much users were willing to pay for the feature.  Prices of anything between 25p and £1.25 were reported and could be paid via PayPal or card.

Facebook will hope that the feature provides an additional source of revenue for the company, whose share price has plummeted since its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in May. The majority of its income is generated by Amazon and the purchase of virtual goods from Facebook’s credit system. Online game developer Zynga generates 15 percent of Facebook’s revenue alone.

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