Facebook Wants You to Pay to Promote Friends' Posts

Facebook
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Facebook is expanding its Promoted Post feature to allow users to let them pay to promote their friends' posts on the social platform, a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.

The company launched a similar product last year that allows users to pay to promote their own posts on their friends' newsfeeds.

(Read More: Facebook Wants You to Pay to Promote Personal Posts )

The new feature will not promote the post to anyone outside of the post's original settings, but will make it more visible to the network that the original source shared it with.

"It's important to know that this feature respects the privacy of the original poster — i.e. it will promote to everyone who originally saw it. You can only promote posts to the people that your friend originally shared with. If you have mutual friends, they'll see that you shared it and promoted it," a Facebook spokesperson said to CNBC.

(Read More: Mark Zuckerberg Now Owns Almost 30% of Facebook )

Also worth noting, only people with fewer than 5,000 friends or subscribers can use the new feature.

So why would anyone ever want to promote something someone else posted?

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Well, some of the most popular uses for the new feature are for promoting another's post about charity donations, publicizing events, renting apartments, and making announcements, according to a Facebook spokesperson.

The new feature isn't available to everyone just yet, but will gradually roll out to all users.

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