The advertising options, which was launched Tuesday, encompass sponsored pages, ads linked to members' activities and a reporting capability for Facebook ads.

The new system also includes a feature named Beacon, which allows marketers to ask Facebook members visiting their Web sites whether they want to tell friends on Facebook about a purchase or other action on their sites.

With the help of the new targeted ad options, Facebook wants to justify its exceptional $15 billion valuation, besides its rapid growth to 50 million users.

On the new Facebook Pages, marketers are able to create their own branded pages, including all the features familiar on personal Facebook pages, such as photos, third-party applications, discussion boards and Flash animation.

What is more fascinating is the Social Ads, the small, banner-like ads tied to Facebook users' activities and placed on their profile page mini-feeds and the News feeds of friends on Facebook.

Marketers can target Social Ads according to a bunch of demographic and behavioral criteria such as country, age, gender, political views, movies and relationship status. Ads are sold via auction based on cost-per-click and CPM.

Company executives said that Facebook would serve Social Ads on feeds to all members at this point. "There aren't many sites where you can opt out of having ads shown to you,” said Facebook spokesman Matt Hicks, according to Media Post.

For example, users can decline to share news of their latest DVD purchase or vacation booking by opting out of the Beacon program. They can do it on a case-by-case basis at the time of purchase, or can do it if they don't want it known that they've made any purchases from particular sites.

Facebook's chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said the company did not plan to modify its privacy policy for the newly launched ad system, because “none of the Facebook member information shared with marketers is personally identifiable data.” He added that the new ad program is to create advertising that's more useful to both users and marketers.

"We saw a real opportunity here to democratize advertising,” he said.

However, Facebook executives said they would listen to feedback from users about the new ads. If they perceive the new ads have become overly intrusive, it could result in a backlash in terms of reduced interaction on the site, Media Post reported.

So far, those concerns have not yet hindered advertisers from taking advantage of the user data on Facebook. Those big names which have tried some aspect of the ad platform include Blockbuster, Coca-Cola, Verizon and Conde Net.