Are you taking advantage of best practices when it comes to promoting news about your business on Facebook? Now you can check with Facebook’s new Facebook + Media page, which launched Monday. The new page — geared toward journalists but with implications for all businesses on Facebook — includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook.

To determine the best practices compiled on the page, Facebook analyzed 100 top media sites that use Facebook’s social plugins.

Okay — so you may not be a media company. But if you publish news about your company on Facebook, Facebook’s new page should be very applicable to you. While the Media Page offers advice to journalists for driving traffic on Facebook, it also includes tips for driving engagement and interaction. If you’re a marketer, these tips can be especially helpful as you try to increase interaction on your business’ Facebook page.

Social News Best Practices for Marketers
Check out our marketers’ guide to Facebook social plugins if you’re unfamiliar with them. Then review some of the most applicable best practices for marketers we pulled from Facebook’s new Media Page. Here they are!

To drive audience and interaction:
•Implement the Like Button social plugin on your website. Implement the version that includes thumbnails of friends, enables comments, and place it at the top and bottom of articles and near visual content like videos/graphics. According to Facebook, websites that followed these best practices experienced 3-5x greater click-through rates on the Like Button.
•Publish to users through Pages and Like button connections. (Click here to find out how.) Status updates asking simple questions or encouraging a user to Like the story have 2-3x the activity. In addition, stories that are published in the early morning or just before bed have higher engagement.
•Run promotions on your Page using FBML tabs.
To increase engagement:
•Implement the Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins. Place these plugins above the fold of your website and on multiple pages to generate more engagement. Sites that placed the Activity Feed on the front page as well as other content pages received 2-10x more clicks per user than sites with plugins only on the front page.
•Planning a live event, webinar or webcast? Use the Live Stream box to capture real-time engagement.
•Keep your pages timely and regularly updated with fresh content to keep people engaged. Update the status on your page often.
Don’t forget Insights!
•Facebook offers basic insights into your Facebook page’s growth, fans and interactivity via Facebook Insights. Your page’s Insights Dashboard will provide metrics to help you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content. Keep track of your business page’s performance to determine what works, what doesn’t and learn how best to engage your fans.

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