No matter how you slice it, Facebook is a dominant player in social networks. Regardless of the social media goals and strategy, Facebook will likely cross into any social media marketing strategy.

Key Facebook Facts:

• According to BlogHer, 93% of adult Americans have a Facebook account.
• 155 million Americans have Facebook accounts.
• 1,000,000,000 users worldwide (yeah, “you know what’s cool? a billion”).
• 56% of Facebook users are female.
• Facebook users visit the site almost every day and spend over 6 hours per month on the site.

01. Building your Facebook Page

Go to Facebook Pages. Hubspot has created a nice 5 step guide to setting up a Facebook Page.

Images

As you build the images on your Facebook page, here is a cheat sheet for the sizes of the images. As a side note, make sure that your images are not too big 72 DPI is the highest resolution that you will need.

• Cover Photo 851 x 315 pixels
• Profile Picture 180 x 180 pixels
• Tab Image 111 x 74 pixels

Custom Tabs

On your Facebook page, you may create custom Tabs/Pages and organize them any way that you want. With Tabs, you have the ability to import iframe pages directly into the page or create custom applications for your community.

• Here is a nice walkthru to creating tabs using iframes.
• Mari Smith has a nice collection of Facebook Pages resources.

02. Building an Audience

After setting up the Facebook page, attracting people to “like” your page is the next step. The following tactics potentially

03. Content Considerations

As you’ll see in the EdgeRank section below, here are a few keys to posting engaging content:

1. Keep your posts short. While you may create long posts, only the first 250 characters will be viewed before displaying “continue reading.” It is best to keep the posts about the length of a tweet or text message.
2. Use Media. Just remember: Pictures > Video > Text.
3. Interact more. Market less. Great Facebook pages engage their community by asking questions, taking polls, collecting opinions, and giving out great information. Seldom visited Facebook Pages scream at their community about how awesome they are. At a minimum, try to post 10 interactive posts for every marketing post.
4. Post Regularly. There is no magic number. Each community is different and will have different tolerances for frequency. Try to start posting 1-2 updates per day and measure the engagement. I think that on the low side, you should post once per day and on the high side 5 posts per day. You will also learn what times and days are best to post. You may services like Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule posts.

 04. Optimizing Content to be Viewed

EdgeRank is Facebook’s algorithm to determine what is displayed in the news feed. It really boils down to three factors:

• Affinity – relationship between the Facebook user and the content creator.
• Weight – type of content posted (image, status, likes, etc).
• Time Decay – how old is post?

Source: GetPostRocket.com 

05. Measurement

Everyone wants more likes, but likes alone provides very little information. Using Facebook Insights, you can measure the results and response of your facebook activity:

1. Number of Posts (and the corresponding response).
2. Number of people actively engaging through comments and likes.
3. PTAT (“People Talking About This”) – this number will tell you who is talking about your page.
4. Likes – clicking the “Likes” tab at the top of the page will reveal the demographic breakdown of your community.
5. Reach - This allows you see your page views and unique visitor views (those who searched for you as opposed to clicking on the Facebook ad).