Facebook has unveiled a new experimental feature that will allow members to promote important status updates or photos for a nominal fee. If you're willing to shell out an average of $7, Facebook will guarantee that your paid-for post will be prominently shown at the top of your friend's news feeds.
The company began testing the feature earlier this year in New Zealand before expanding to more than 20 other countries. A post on the social network's official blog didn't outline how many of the site's 166 million users in the US would initially have access to the feature. We do know, however, that promoted posts are being limited to users with fewer than 5,000 friends or subscribers.
Facebook has been offering a similar service to businesses for some time although this is the first venture that allows the general public to get in on the action. Just last week the social network began rolling out another new source of revenue called Facebook Gifts that allows users to buy and send real-life gifts to friends and family members.
We're interested to hear your opinion on this new promotion feature. There's sure to be some users that will take advantage of the service to advertise big events like a marriage proposal or the announcement of a pregnancy. It's also entirely possible that some users will see the tool as another way to promote a small business for personal gain but in the end, are users really interested in seeing even more clutter on their news feed each day?