Facebook begins allowing profiles to pay to promote posts

Facebook has been testing various revenue streams since 2008 but they have accelerated the frequency of the tests since going public earlier this year. Now, the “personal” part of Facebook, profiles of individuals, are being propelled onto the list of potential dollars for the social networking giant.

Users can now “Promote” their individual profile posts. This is a feature that has been available for a while on Facebook pages but posts on Facebook profiles, the ones held by individuals, have not had this option. Now, they do.

Promoting a post moves it up higher into friends’ news feeds and places a “sponsored” tag on them. On pages, it can be used to increase impressions of posts exponentially for a relatively small amount of money. Pages with fewer than 2000 fans can get a good boost for $5. The price options go up depending on how many users like the page. Promoting profile posts has a flat fee of $7.

The statistics are still not exact. Profiles have never had the Insight feature that pages have. When promoted, profile posts are only given percentages versus the exact numbers that are available on pages.

Allowing profile posts to be promoted opens up a new avenue for marketers. Unlike page posts, the prompt to promote does not appear on everyone’s posts. Only those who have promoted page posts have the option at this point.