Interesting new development to help turn Facebook fans into customers:

Facebook is taking steps to boost ad spending directly through brand pages, while also giving marketers new tools for managing their presence on the social network. The social network has rolled out promoted posts to extend the reach of page content, as well as providing companies different access levels to their Facebook pages internally.

Promoted posts allow Facebook page administrators to boost exposure for their posts beyond the normal reach they get in fans’ news feeds — and without having to go through a separate ad dashboard. Facebook, however, doesn’t specify how much larger a percentage of a brand’s fans will see a post that’s promoted.

Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/175906/facebook-rolls-out-promoted-posts-new-page-tools.html#ixzz1wU7d5r4O

Well one already practiced method used to good effect  by online betting provider Paddy Power is to use Sponsored Stories, which also artificially raise the number of people who will see the post, while still retaining the benefits of social content. The basic on a brief slideshare taken from the Adobe Summit 2012 for Sony EU: