Facebook Inc. (FB) Offers ‘Offers’ for Businesses – At A Price

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has recently been rolling out an Offers feature for businesses in order to produce a coupon offer for Facebook fans, or other Facebook users. Macy’s as well as many local stores have taken advantage of this couponing feature, but now Facebook is looking to add a wrinkle: Sure, you can participate in our Offers program, but now you’ll need to advertise with us first.

Yep, the slogan “free and always will be” may apply to making a Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) profile, but not to set up a coupon program for your fans.

For about a year, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has been slowly rolling out this coupon concept for businesses, and a few have taken advantage – a concept where companies could make posts on their pages that serve as coupons for those who see their posts either on their page or on users’ News Feeds. Now, however, after several months, Facebook late last week rolled out a new premium program – which means that businesses can participate in this Facebook Offers program, provided they make a minimal advertising investment and provide targeted messaging rather than blasting to all available Facebook users.

For some companies, having access to even a small amount of user data that Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has on file with its 900-million-plus users, this would be worth an advertising budget to be able to reach out to these potential customers to drive traffic in their brick-and-mortar stores or on their online stores. There isn’t much information about the pricing structure of this program, but certainly with revenue being a concern for the company, finding a new channel of revenue is one that investors in Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) stock  – like Tiger Global Management LLC‘s private-equity funds – will certainly look at to see if it become a reasonable revenue stream for Facebook. That likely will be a big question going forward.