Facebook is rolling out a new feature to help you reach more of your fans, and friends of your fans, but it comes at a cost. The last few weeks has seen several reports of people being able to pay to promote their own individual posts, and reach more people. It seems as though Facebook is now rolling this out to Page owners, at least those with more than 400 fans. Some Page owners are now able to pay to increase the likelihood of reaching more people with their posts. The posts can be any of Facebook’s standard types: status update, image, video, event etc. You can choose to promote a post when you create it, or anytime in the 3 days following. When you choose to promote a post it will show up in news feeds with a subtle ‘sponsored’ indicator. Facebook then provides you with real-time analytics about the number of people reached organically and as a result of your paid promotion. This could be particularly useful for helping promote your Facebook page to a larger audience. The big problem we foresee is that the best content generally spreads nicely organically. People are likely to be inclined to use this feature to spread that content that isn’t nearly as interesting or remarkable. If this happens, it has the potential to increase the amount of noise in people’s news feeds, reducing the effectiveness of the feature for everyone. It will be interesting to see how this feature works over the coming weeks and months. If you get the chance to use it we would love to hear about your experience in the comments below. Watch the video or read more about the promoted posts feature in the Facebook help centre. Megaphone symbol is by Simon Child, from The Noun Project collection.