Top 5 Facebook Marketing Tips 2013

We’re refreshing our Top 5 Facebook social media marketing tips for 2013. You can see the original article here.

Timeline covers – the large picture at the top of your business page – are relatively new enough. However, Facebook recently rewrote the rules concerning placement of CTAs, formerly a definite no-no, now a yes-yes. As long as you keep the amount of text to less than 20% of the total cover image area, you can direct visitors to visit your website, take up a discount offer, download a new ebook, and so on. 

Likes on posts are great, but comments are thought to have a greater influence on EdgeRank – the algorithm Facebook uses to determine where items appear in a user’s news feed. The more EdgeRank your business page and posts have, the more likely you are to be seen by your followers. It’s a lot like Google Search’s PageRank (PR) algorithm.

One new way to encourage comments is to use picture replies, a new feature for 2013 which we cover in some detail in The Marketers’ Guide to Facebook Hashtags & Comment Images. One idea is to post a picture and ask followers to post versions of their own, or anything that will encourage them to post images as replies. This will work wonders for your EdgeRank. 

The positive EdgeRank factors are: 

• Affinity – users that interact with a particular page and its posts will be more likely to see subsequent content from the same source. This also includes interactions of other users, so if there are lots of comments and likes for one post, Facebook will consider it more interesting and increase its chances of being seen in news feeds of other page followers.
• Weight – a user that interacts with photos more, will see more pictures in his or her news feed. The same goes for different post types such as videos, status updates and shared articles.
• Time decay – much like Google’s freshness factor, Facebook will seek to provide new content over old.

For more on these factors, as well as negative EdgeRank, read SocialMediaToday.com’s EdgeRank’s Newest Factor: Negative Feedback. 

A picture is much more likely to attract attention than a simple status update, or even a shared article. Resize your image to 407 x 407 pixels and it’ll appear in full in news feeds without any cropping – larger pictures aren’t truly cropped, but do tend to have their edges clipped in previews so that they fit nicely within a person’s timeline. 

We share our own blog articles (including this one if you came her via Facebook), as image posts rather than shared links. 

Overlaying text on your shared images – and thus converting them into elaborate CTAs – is a great way to increase their marketing potential. Just be careful not to get too wordy, as the 20% text rule we mentioned in Tip 1 may also apply to posts.

This is very important if you’re going to follow Tip 3 for promoting blog posts, ebooks or landing page offers, because you’ll need to include the URL in the image description. Usually Facebook would remove URLs and simply include a preview with a clickable title, but for images it can’t do this.

A long URL will seem unsightly, so always use a URL shortening service like Bit.ly, which will also track clicks for you. Better still, personalise your shortened URLs – visit Bit.ly for help on how to set up a custom short domain. 

We couldn’t really write a piece on Facebook marketing tips without mentioning one of the latest developments to receive a lot of attention – hashtags. Use these very much like you would on Twitter, but try to keep it focused as they can be quite polarising. Use too many and you risk annoying people, the rules governing Facebook hashtag etiquette are still unclear. 

Turn to your keyword strategy – you’ll have one if you Search Engine Optimise (SEO) your web pages and blog articles – for help with hashtags. Although they have no effect on Google or Bing SEO that we know of, you’ll still need some focus and a strategy behind the use of hashtags as marketing tools. Also, keep your hashtags consistent across all your social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Google+. 

Facebook advertising got a whole lot more sophisticated this year. If you have a list of email addresses, export them from your address book or CRM and import them into Facebook Adverts Manager. You can then target display advertising at any users Facebook finds as a match for your email list – a powerful new targeting option.

The Lookalike Audiences extension allows you to match users who aren’t already your followers, to the custom audience lists you create. Read more about it all in 7 Steps to Mastering Facebook Custom and Lookalike Audiences.