Facebook's Promoted Posts: Good For Business?
The company announced Wednesday that you can pay your way to the top of the newsfeed.
Courtesy Company
On Wednesday, Facebook announced a new, paid feature that could make it easier for small businesses to market themselves using their owners' personal Facebook pages. For about $7, a user can ensure that their post will get bumped to the top of their friends' news feeds.
A Facebook representative told CNET that it is not currently confirming the price of the promoted posts. The $7 figure comes from a demo of the feature.
According the announcement on Facebook, the option to promote a post is currently available in 21 countries, including the U.S. In that announcement, Facebook software engineer Abhishek Dosi wrote that the new service is available to people with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers.
“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,” Dosi wrote.
While the feature is similar to paid promotions that have been available for Facebook Pages since May, the tool should prove helpful to small businesses, especially those that may not have a brand page. The service should also allow companies to share business news with friends without fear the post will get lost in the newsfeed.
Screenshots of the service show that the promoted posts will provide analytics, showing how many more views the specific post has garnered as a result of the paid promotion. Facebook’s announcement did not say how long the post would remain “higher in the news feed” once paid for.
