According to a couple of sources out there in the internet, Facebook has started to roll out the Promoted Post feature for Page administrators. Whenever the feature arrives for you and yours, you’ll notice a new “Promote” option next to the box where you type your status update; as of now, from what others have been reporting, the option will sit to the left of the drop-down menu of lists of audiences you want to share your post with, which is next to the blue “Post” button.

The polished up debut of Promoted Posts appears to build upon something Facebook tested out as far back as March 2010. Essentially, the purpose of paying to promote your update is to reach a larger audience. Upon clicking the “Promote” button, you’ll be presented with a menu of pricing options. The prices to promote a post are staggered based on how much of a reach you want for your post. If you’re aiming for the fences, for example, you can pay $20 to reach about a wide audience of Facebookers who have liked your Page. Alternately, if you want to aim more conservatively, you can select a less expensive value, such as $5, the cheapest (that I’ve seen), to only reach about a more concentrated selection your total fanbase.

WebProNews’ Facebook page hasn’t yet been granted the Promote function just yet, but the example below was captured by MarketingLand, who apparently have the feature now.

They’ve got a few other examples of what the new feature looks like on their post about it, if you’re so inclined to investigate the visual evidence further.

More, Facebook appears to be testing out different pricing structures. Another example spotted over at Business Insider lists the dollar increments as $15, $20, $30, $50, and $75. If I had to guess at this point, I’d say that the different pricing structures – notice BI’s gets a lot more expensive than MarketingLand’s – the different pricing scales are relative to the amount of Facebook fans your Page has. However, if that is the case, it almost seems like Facebook would then be penalizing Pages that have a ton of fans if it’s going to cost those administrators more money to promote a post than it would if they had, say, a fourth of the fans. Guess we’ll wait and see once this feature is fully available.

This Promoted Post feature doesn’t sound all too dissimilar to something Facebook was testing in New Zealand recently by giving the average Facebook user – not to be confused with the Page users that are for brands, companies, celebrities, etc. – an option to promote their posts. The pay option to promote your post to all of your friends ran about a $1.50 but there weren’t any reports that there were multiple pricing tiers.

Finally, there’ve been some reports throughout the day today that businesses have been having trouble posting updates to their Facebook Pages, so there could be a possible connection to Facebook’s decision to start rolling out the Promoted Posts option to pages and this temporary impairment of Page administrators’ ability to post links. As of writing this, we’re still not able to post links through our WPN page.

Anybody else out there getting their hands on the Promoted Post feature early? Let us know what you think, if you’d ever use it, why you’d use it, all that good stuff in the comments below.