Ever promoted one of your Facebook posts? Yeah, neither have we. But Facebook is apparently hoping we’ll be more excited about promoting other people’s thoughts, announcements, and cat photos. Yesterday it began rolling out a new feature that allows you to pay to promote your friend’s posts, TechCrunch reports. And it doesn’t give you any say in whether someone else can promote your post. While the promoted post will respect privacy settings, it “could still make you look like a self-important prick,” Josh Constine observes for TechCrunch. The feature is being rolled out slowly, and will initially only be available to people with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers. In its announcement, Facebook envisioned worthy uses for the feature, like publicizing a friend’s marathon for charity. But as Constine notes, “A friend could jokingly promote an embarrassing photo of me, or my status about something bad happening to me.” Despite the stigma attached to paying for post visibility, there is a decent reason to do it; Facebook only shows your average, non-promoted Facebook post to just 16% of your friends.
