Facebook Offering Users Premium Features For A Fee

Facebook published a post on their newsroom blog, announcing that starting today they are slowly rolling out a premium feature to people in more than 20 countries (including the US). The new feature, which they say is currently just in testing phases, allows users to pay $7 to promote a post their friends. This would mean more of your friends would see your posts in their News Feed.

So why would anyone even want to do this?

Well, as Facebook has evolved and grown, the News Feed of many users has become increasingly more busy, with things like status updates from friends, posts from pages they have liked, and paid ads from marketers. This means, it’s entirely possible that in the blizzard of posts that make their way across your News Feed, posts from some of friends can get lost, or in some cases never show up.

You probably haven’t ever noticed it but Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what posts appear in your News Feed, the algorithm uses all the data they have about you to determine which posts should appear and which shouldn’t. The friends you talk to or engage with more typically will dominant your Facebook News Feed.

According to Facebooker, Abhishek Doshi, “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.”

The feature isn’t available to everyone yet, and may never be, as it’s currently just a test. The only limitation as of right now is that you need to have less than 5,000 friends or subscribers to even potentially have access to the feature.

What do you think of this new premium feature?