Facebook offers users to promote a post…for $7

No longer do you need a Facebook page to promote your posts on Facebook. The social network is slowly opening its advertising offerings to all users beginning this month. A limited number of users can now promote an “important post” to their friends on Facebook. Users simply choose the post they want to promote, click the “promote” link under the post, and enter their billing information. The result is a post that displays higher in the users’ friends’ newsfeeds and is marked as Sponsored. This is exactly to what users have seen for the past few months in their newsfeeds from brand Pages. The offering will be released to all users eventually.

The catch to this new offer? The cost is $7. On top of that, users are not told how long their post will actually stay Sponsored. Via the Facebook help center:

“Promoted posts run until they’re no longer eligible to be shown in news feed. It isn’t possible to change the dates or times of a promoted post.”

So, what exactly does “no longer eligible” mean? I’m not sure. You could be paying $7 for merely a few hours of promotion.

Besides the high price and lack of insight into the length of promotion, the reporting features are relatively low. Facebook will offer users to see insights on their promoted posts a day after it is promoted. The insights show how the increase in reach the post received after promoting it.

Will this catch on? Probably not. For the cost of the promotion, I think users need more insights as to how long their post will run and how many impressions their ad received. I would much rather run some Facebook ads where I can at least see how many impressions and actions my ad has received. Not to mention I would be able to control how much per thousand I am willing to pay to promote the ad.

What do you think of this new ad product? Have you seen any of your friends on Facebook actually use it?

-Bryan Nagy