Facebook announced that it is rolling out a new ad format called Sponsored Stories, which allows advertisers to prioritize content from the News Feed by turning your Facebook activity into promoted content.

How does it work? Lets say one of your Page updates, Likes, application interactions or Place check-ins mention a participating brand, that story will appear in the column at the right of your friends’ News Feeds. “For example,” writes Advertising Age, “if Starbucks buys a ‘sponsored story’ ad, the status of a user’s friends who check into or ‘like’ Starbucks will run twice: once in the user’s news feed, and again as a paid ad for Starbucks.”

Sponsored Stories are seen only by your friends that would normally see your stories in their News Feeds. However, at this time, there is no op-out for new feature according to the product’s help page.

Check out the video below for more information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZuiC8WVOw&feature=player_embedded