Facebook users may soon be able to pay for their posts to be promoted into more of their friend’s newsfeeds. Brands and Facebook Page owners have been able to pay to promote their posts to more of their followers for a while now. Indeed I have used the feature myself for my business page in the past.

At the moment your Facebook newsfeed is generated not simply by posting all the updates that any of your friends make. Rather it is created algorithmically, based upon which users you interact with most and also I suspect whose profiles you visit the most. This should lead to a newsfeed that provides you with the content that you would most want to see. The idea behind this move by the social media giant is that there may be times that you want to make sure that a particular post to be seen by more people. A typical example would be the birth of a child. You may have an old college friend on Facebook who you rarely interact with but it’s just nice knowing that they are there. Due to the infrequency of your interaction with each other when you do post something to say that you have just become a Mum/Dad for the first time you might want that person to know about the happy occasion without having to write a personal message. This new system would allow you to do it for a small fee.

How about if you wanted to sell your car? If you can sell it privately then you are likely to raise more cash than if you sell it to a car dealer. However, if you sell a car to a stranger then you take the risk that you might get ripped off. Your friends are less likely to get ripped off so it might be worth your while to advertise to your friends in their newsfeeds. This could create a whole new platform for selling goods online. The ad that you place would not appear to your friends to be an ad but a news item and I wonder how long it will be before marketers are looking at ways to leverage this ability to get adverts placed in a newsfeed. One thought I had would be people who create accounts to gather “friends” (followers would be a better term in this case) who are lured in with the promise of special offers and deals that they might not otherwise see. Companies would then pay the person to promote a link to their site through the persons Facebook account.

The system was tested earlier this year in New Zealand and is now being tested internationally to small pool of users. Facebook have so far refrained from stating how many people are taking part in the experiment or where they are based.

At first glance I did not see that this could ever be popular enough to make it cost effective. My initial thoughts were that users can send a personal message to their friend(s) with the important piece of news in for free and so why would they want to pay to effectively do the same thing? Then I started to think a little more about not only this experiment but also Facebook in general. In many ways Facebook is a bit of a popularity contest. Everybody can see how many friends you have got and how much other people engage with you. This sort of promoted post is likely to generate post responses and responses equal kudos in the Facebook ecosystem.

I think that this is likely to be a bit of a slow burner with users initially resistance due to the fact that they have to pay for what they can do for free but over time they are likely to try it out. I think it would be analogous to when mobile phones first became popular and tariffs were relatively expensive. People would buy their first mobile and say that they had got it for emergencies, so their partner could get hold of them if one of the children was ill, in the event of a breakdown etc. Over time this would change to calling hole on the way back from work to see if you needed to pick anything up from the shops and eventually people started to spend more time talking on the phone than talking in person.

Facebook are looking at new ways to monetise following their flotation on the stock market and with close on a billion users it does make sense to try to leverage cash out of their user base as well as out of business users.

Would you use this facility if it was available to you? Leave me a comment and let me know.