Facebook this week introduced Sponsored Stories, a feature that will let advertisers promote status update mentions of their brands in a special promoted section.

Sponsored Stories lets advertisers take word-of-mouth recommendations and promote them, Facebook employees said in a video demonstration.

If a friend checks into Starbucks, for example, that check-in will show up on a news feed, but depending on how many friends you have, it could quickly get buried beneath other status updates, photo postings, or FarmVille stats. With Sponsored Stories, Starbucks could pick up that posting and feature it in the sponsored section on the right-hand side of your homepage. It will only appear to friends; your check-in will not show up for complete strangers.

Facebook insisted that the feature is not intended to force certain products on you. "It's your friend saying 'look, I did this and I want to tell you about it,'" Facebook said. In tests, the feature increased "brand lift," especially ad recall and likeliness to recommend to a friend, the company said.

"We wanted to give a way for application developers, page owners, place owners to be able to promote their content that's as core to the user experience as the news feed, and I think with Sponsored Stories we've created that," Facebook said.

Facebook did not say when this might start showing up.

According to a recent AdAge report, Facebook took in $1.86 billion in ad revenue in 2010, and 60 percent ($1.12 billion) came from smaller companies.