US becomes second country to get Facebook’s promoted posts for people

Looks like Facebook is serious about letting individual people pay to promote their posts. The social networking giant announced late yesterday that people in the US would also be included in the experiment.

The service first rolled out in New Zealand in May, with random users in Europe and the US reporting that they had access to the feature in September.

According to Facebook:

Every day, news feed delivers your posts to your friends. Sometimes a particular friend might not notice your post, especially if a lot of their friends have been posting recently and your story isn’t near the top of their feed.

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.

Facebook’s post doesn’t give any indication of how much it will cost to promote a post, although one US user has reported they were asked to spend US$6.30 to promote a post.

Once someone’s paid to promote a post they can see how much more reach it has accrued.

Like promoted posts for business, which rolled out in May, the personal version works by expanding the Edgerank algorithm, which caps the number of people who see your posts.