10 Tips on running a great Facebook Page, by Facebook

I thought I knew pretty much everything about how Facebook works – I promote a couple of blogs off there and have probably spent months of my life on the site.. – but I’ve just been to a workshop about promoting sites and businesses at Facebook HQ London, and guess what, turns out I didn’t know everything.

Head of International Business Development, Christian Hernandez Gallando, took us through all the basics, but there was a bunch of more pro tips mixed in. I pasted the ones that surprised me below.

I’m skipping the basics, because I assume you all know how to set up a page, so this article is really for the Power Users. So here are 10 tips on optimising how your business uses Facebook, from Facebook.

1) Like/Recommend button: and which one to choose
These work in exactly the same way but Facebook introduced “Recommend” as a variation on “Like” after feedback from news sites.. who found that readers didn’t want to “like” on stories about war or natural disaster, but would “recommend” them.
So – if you’re a news site, or publish serious/negative content, consider the “recommend” option.

2) Pictures and Videos get much more interaction than text
If you want a lot of comments and likes – post a picture or video, these posts get significantly more interaction than just text we were told. At least make sure there’s a thumbnail in there somewhere…

3) If Thumbnails don’t work use the Facebook Linter
I have spent too much of my life trying to get thumbnails from blogposts to post correctly on Facebook. So there’s actually a little widget if you’re having regular problems getting things to look right on your Facebook page. Go to this page developers.facebook.com/tools/lint & then maybe ask a techie to help you.

4) You can post to a page by Mobile.
Posting to a page from mobile is straightforward from within the iPhone Facebook app, but doesn’t work yet on Android, or on any other phone, so you may want to check out the Mobile posting section on behind d “Edit page”. You can text status updates to the page, or post pictures to the page by email, using the number and email address supplied. Good for fresh content on the go – Twitter style..

5) There are more FB widgets than just “Like”, check out “Friend Activity”
I knew you could embed the Like button on a blog, but I didn’t know you could also embed things like the Activity Feed. Stuck in the sidebar of a blog this shows which posts on your site have had the most activity on Facebook and if a user is logged into Facebook it will show them what their friends liked throughout the site offering a nice quick way into the content of your site.
Facebook social widgets can be browsed here: developers.facebook.com/plugins

6) People are much more likely to “like” or “recommend” a story if two of their friends have liked it and the “like” button is configured to show pictures of those friends.
You can set the like button to show just people’s names, but it’s more emotive and powerful if you set it to show a little thumbnail of people’s faces. FB showed us some stats saying that if two of your friends liked something then you were 10x more likely to like it yourself than if just one of your friends liked it.
Go figure.

7) Lady Gaga does her Facebook Page very well, Barack Obama not so well.
From a Facebook Page people want more than just updates from your official website, they want to feel like they’re getting something a bit more personal – pictures from backstage or little messages that sound genuine. Lady Gaga does this very well. Barack’s page comes across as more stiff and less authentic according to the Facebook exec. Go look and learn.

8) Don’t faff around with page design, just make sure you have great content: 80% of all stories are read on the news feed
Make your page nice by all means, but the key thing is “having engaging emotional” content as Mr Facebook himself put it: good headlines, good thumbnail pictures, good So when it crops up in your fans’ news feeds they click through to the story..

9) You will have more long-term impact than you think: individual pages you like get stored in a list on your profile.
I’m not sure this feature is live yet, because I haven’t noticed it on my personal profile (maybe it was a feature of the new Facebook interface that the demonstrater was using) but every individual URL you like will go to a section in your profile. People will see you like the Independent’s page, but also every article on there that you’ve ever clicked “like” on… Which means you will end up with a massive bit of your profile full of every article you’ve ever liked.

10) There is an InSight tool for the Like button: it’s probably amazing
I only partly understood this, but it looks awesome. Insights for Pages is great – it lets you see the age ranges, locations of people who like your page. InSight for Like is even better, because it shows you activity around your content, how many clicks you get off each share for example, rather than people who just said they liked you once.
Unfortunately it’s a little complex getting it to work. You need some coding on your site linking your site to your facebook profile so that Facebook know you are genuinely authorised to see that information. Work it out and get it.

[Things I don’t mention which are also important – InSight for Pages; promoting your page with Facebook adverts; linking your Facebook account to Twitter; the Facebook social graph]

Any more tips? Stick them in the comments…