10 Facebook Marketing Tips Everyone Should Know.
Posted by
Jay Teal on Tue, Oct 02, 2012 @ 02:20 PM
Facebook marketing can be confusing, challenging, and worst of all difficult to get any return on investment. Here are 10 Facebook marketing tips to help you get the most out of your social media marketing efforts: 
1. Facebook is a huge time sink - Create a time sink. Facebook is one huge "time sink" - the apps, games, sharing, and digital socialization within the platform can take up as much as 8 hours of browsing time. Create your own Facebook time sink (such as an app, a quiz, or an interactive mini-game) to truly engage your fans beyond the occasional likes, shares, and comments.
2. Facebook fans don't matter until you engage them - Engage your fans. The number of fans you have should not be the metric by which you measure your marketing success on Facebook; it's how well you engage them that truly matters. Indeed, when engagement is there, the numbers will follow as your fans will surely spread word of mouth marketing for you.
3. Facebook Apps can be effective lead generation tools - Integrate lead generation with your apps. You obtain all the lead info you need to acquire the first time people grant permission for your app to access basic info from their profiles, and through what they do in your app, you can qualify at what stage of the marketing cycle these people are. Providers who offer such services include SnapApp and eCircle.
4. Include Facebook in your content strategy, not just your social media marketing plans - A couple of steps to take in this direction include setting up an editorial calendar or schedule of posts, and creating a proper content repurposing format for your blog posts or website content specific to Facebook.
5. Content placement on Facebook matters - Place your most important content on the right-hand side of your page, pin it to the top of your Timeline feed, include it in your mobile news feed, and try to include a log out experience if possible.
6. Facebook social sign-ups on external sites help ecommerce - Integrate Facebook social sign-up for your ecommerce website. It saves time and avoids hassling people to take the time for a full sign-up when they're ready to checkout for the first time.
7. Using the Timeline properly makes a huge impact - Use a good image in your Timeline cover photo (851x315 pixels) and your profile image (180x180 pixels) as well as visible tabs (111x74 pixels) and make sure you maximize the 150 characters in your About section. Pin important posts, milestones, and stars in your Timeline.
8. Introduce your calls to action in Facebook content early - Make your calls to action within the first 90 characters of Facebook content if they are meant to advertise.
9. Brand, brand, brand - Make use of image association and branding everywhere: in Timeline posts, in the cover, in your profile image, and within a branded URL that you can obtain after reaching enough fans.
10. Know the most effective social content types for your audience - Generally, the most effective social content are images with worded descriptions that are above 141 characters in length. All you need to add are tweaks to ensure the social content matches your target market.
These tips span engagement to branding to lead generation and more. Try them out for yourself and see the difference they can make, and continue to learn how best to leverage Facebook for your own business endeavors as part of a successful marketing campaign that spans social, content, branding strategy, and more.
Do you have some other ideas or tips? Please let me know, comment below!