Facebook has thrown in a smart move to promote its advertisers. The social media giant is in process of rolling out Sponsored Stories in the news feed. It was detailed that the ads would be rolled out gradually, from the start of the next year. This move will allow brands to extend their reach to those users whose friends have interacted with their pages – for instance with a like, a comment, or another action.
Annie Ta, Facebook spokesperson, told ClickZ News early this afternoon, “You will only see Sponsored Stories in your news feed about your friends or people you are connected to.” She continued noting, “You will never a post from a page you are not a fan of, or from people who are not your friends.”
Without fail, she expressed her, rather Facebook’s revived new thoughts on Sponsored Stories, as she added, “We want to be really thoughtful about this, so we’ll have a lot of rate limits in place. We hope to show people no more than one Sponsored Story in their News Feeds per day and we’ll clearly label the story. They’ll also be of the same size and treatment as other stories in News Feed.”
Till now, Facebook has had a definition to its sponsored stories, which was noted as under:
Sponsored Stories are regular News Feed stories that have been promoted to the right column of Facebook, where you may be more likely to discover new things that your friends are interested in. These stories only show up for friends, so you can learn about places to go, apps to use, games to play and organizations your friends like.
It seems Facebook had planned the same, long time back. May be since August, when the social networking site launched ticker. Ticker is a lightweight news feed, which is seen on the upper right-hand part of Facebook.com. The rolling out of Sponsored Stories in the ticker was expected to be in soon.
Talking about the pricing, it was not known, but the advertisers would be gunning for it and expectedly the pricing might be known to everyone interested in it. The list of brands, who would get access to this facility were not known too.
Again, it could help Facebook proceed with their plans to get down to mobiles with advertisers. Ta ruled out the possibility saying that Sponsored Stories in the news feed will not extend to mobile at launch. However, that is still an option, which can be considered at any point of time by Facebook.
Facebook, with this move, will definitely not please the common Facebook user. This is because a user would be mainly interested in getting updates related to their own preference and like many recent Facebook changes, it seems this change will face still criticism.
Would it really affect Facebook’s presence and activeness?
The activeness would still not be affected majorly, but if the move is successful, the Christmas special move will fetch Facebook’s goodie bags with loads and loads of money, over and above its normal earnings.
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