Don’t have a premium advertising account on Facebook? No worries, now Sponsored Stories are available to all brands via Facebook’s self-serve advertising. If you’re worried that your Facebook content is getting buried in news feeds, you can now pay for them to have a premium position on the right-hand side of the user’s news feed.

With Sponsored Stories, brands can pull likes, check-ins, app usage, etc. from their fans and post them in a premium position on their friends’ sidebars.

Pricing for Sponsored Stories is comparable to Facebook ads, depending on the targeting you select. These ads allow businesses to leverage users’ check-ins and likes.

So, do Facebook users find this creepy? Yes. And now that it is available to anyone with a Facebook Page, users will start seeing them more frequently. On top of that, at this time there is no way to universally opt out of being featured in Sponsored Stories.

While there is always backlash when Facebook rolls out some new way to invade our privacy, we all usually just get used to it, don’t we? Especially since Facebook has learned from its last epic fail.

If you are considering using this tactic to promote your Facebook Page, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Quality over Quantity – these ads are only viewable to friends of those checking in and liking your brand. If you’re looking for mass reach, or if you have only a small number of fans, you may want to consider another avenue.
2. Same Risks as Facebook Page – as far as we can tell, there is no filter to keep me from checking in at Starbucks with “Standing in line FOREVER at Starbucks.” Except this time, Starbucks is paying for it.
3. More Engaging – Facebook claims Sponsored Stories are strong in both Ad Recall and Likeliness to Recommend because of the Word-of-Mouth nature of these ads.