Add a few Facebook best practices to your social media strategy
Many companies are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon and creating pages for their publications and blogs on Facebook. There are good reasons for doing this (ie. driving more traffic) and bad reasons for doing this (ie. selling more products). One leads to the other, but Facebook on its own is not a big moneymaker in the publishing industry.
Before you launch a Facebook business page (or go any further), here are five things you should know about Facebook marketing.
#1. Be Who and What You Are: If your brand revolves around an identifiable personal brand – leverage that before creating a business page. For example, if you’re Martha Stewart, you are going to make much more headway with a personal account that links to a business page than a business account alone. Why? Because Facebook is a personal network and everyone prefers to interact with a person rather than a brand. Even if Martha doesn’t manage her own account.
#2. Maybe a Facebook Group Does the Job Better? A Facebook Group is sometimes a better way to use the social network. While there is only a 5,000 member limit on this advantage, what they do allow you to do is send bulk Facebook mail to everyone in your group. When you have a Facebook page that someone “likes”, your posts only show up in their feed. Once you have more than 5,000 members, you can’t bulk mail your members anymore.
[text_ad]
#3. Make Landing Pages with Custom Tabs. You can use Facebook’s custom tabs to create landing pages. If you have a free report marketplace, doll it up and throw in a list of all your free reports that point back to your landing pages. By the way, as of this past Monday, Facebook pages have been scaled from 760px down to 520px. Within the next few months, Facebook will be supporting iFrames as well.
#4. Integrate Facebook into Your Blog. If you’re going full-throttle with Facebook, you can integrate it seamlessly with your website through the use of Facebook plugins. These plugins can do as much as allow people to sign into your website with their Facebook ID, or simply share articles.
#5. Get Familiar with FBML (Facebook Markup Language). That is, if you want to make the most of your Facebook page. Facebook is gradually fading out FBML and will hopefully graduate to HTML at one point, but in the meantime, you’ll run into many less roadblocks by learning the Facebook coding language.
Do you have any additional tips you’d like to share with other publishers? Let us know in the comments.
