Soon, there will be another distinction. Facebook is currently rolling out a new feature that they call sponsored stories. These sponsored stories tie in with Facebook’s social advertising strategy. Businesses can promote their services on Facebook with the help of this new feature.

Several friend activities can trigger a sponsored story: page likes, page posts, page post likes, check ins, app shares, apps used and games played, and domain stories.

Here is how it works. A company decides to promote their products or services on Facebook. When one of your friends on Facebook triggers one of the actions above, a sponsored story may appear in your news ticker. Facebook gives one example on the Sponsored Stories for users faq pages:

For example, if your friend likes the Starbucks Page and a story about it is published in your News Feed, you may see a Sponsored Story about it if Starbucks has opted to promote it.

When you look at the Sponsored Stories for Businesses and Organizations, everything becomes clearer.

Sponsored Stories allow you to surface word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand that exist organically in the Facebook News Feed. To promote your Page, you can use Sponsored Stories to surface both Page Likes and Page Post Likes. For example, if a person’s friends like a Page, in addition to potentially seeing that news story in their News Feed, they can now also see the same story on the right-hand column on Facebook. Additionally, if you create a Page post and someone likes the post, this story can now appear on the right-hand column as well as in the News Feed.

The big issue here is that the ads do not look like advertisement at all. Take a look at a sample that you can create when you try to create sponsored stories as a business or organization.

It basically states[friend's name] likes [business name].

Facebook users who do not want to see sponsored stories or the Facebook ticker on Facebook can install browser extensions or userscripts to disable the feature.

Facebook Fixer is just one Greasemonkey script that can be used to change the Facebook pages. It is one of the more powerful scripts that gets updated regularly to keep up with the official changes. Every feature of the script can be turned on and off separately in the options:

• Bigger Profile Pictures and Photos
• Bigger Album Pictures
• Load Full Albums
• Video Download Links
• Homepage Customization
• Age and Sign of People displayed
• Calendar Integration
• Keyboard Shortcuts
• Removes Facebook | from the title of each page
• Error Page Reloading, automatically reloads pages that throw up errors
• Automatic Update

Facebook Homepage

Facebook Photos

Options

The Greasemonkey script works on the latest Facebook design. Users who want to remove Facebook ads can install this script to do so. Firefox users need to install the Greasemonkey add-on before any scripts can be installed.