As Facebook continues the, “throw revenue-generating ideas at the wall and hope one of them sticks” phase of its existence, the company has announced that it will allow you to promote catchy status updates and posts that your friends have come up with.

There is definitely a need for a feature like this. An unpromoted post reaches, at best, 16% of your friends. Of that 16%, some won’t see the post, some will be at dinner, and some will be playing Farmville. And there are times when that just will not do. Perhaps, for example, your friend is running a marathon for charity and you'd like to help him or her get the word out. Perhaps another friend made a beautiful album of their trip to Paraguay, and you want to share it with your friends. Or perhaps you're just a scumbag who hates your Facebook friends and is willing to pay real money to share their most embarrassing posts and photos to as many people as possible. No matter who you are, you'll probably find some use for the promotion feature.

Will this new feature add value to Facebook? Probably. Though many have speculated that no one actually uses Promoted Posts, it is obvious that the feature must have caught on to some degree. If it hadn't, Facebook wouldn’t be expanding it. (And no, we cannot tell you how well this new feature has been accepted because Facebook has released no data.) Right now, most of the speculation is not on, “will this make money”, but rather “Will this make money before the spammers and trolls hijack the feature and make Facebook too unpleasant to use?” And though it's too early to tell, the feature will most likely be too expensive to be abused.

The feature rolls out to accounts with fewer than 5,000 subscribers (in other words, all of them) this week. We'll keep you posted on how it works out for the social media giant.