Launching new Facebook apps is cool but remember that the majority of brand impressions occurs on the news feed, not on your Facebook Page.

According to Comscore, a Brand’s number of impressions in the news feed could be up to 294 times higher (no typo) than impressions on the Page itself.

To put it simply, your success (or failure) on Facebook depends on your ability to generate visibility in your fans’ news feed, not on how beautiful your brand new app is.

To maximize your results, we’ve devised a simple trick to increase your brand posts’ impact using Facebook’s photo album feature.

If you post pictures on your Facebook Page, here is how it generally looks in your fans’ news feed : 

But if you’re a launching a new product or service you may want to publish posts with a bigger branding impact. Here’s a solution we’ve been working on.

The solution isn’t perfect. Agreed. But instead of small vignettes you now have a wider picture to present your novelty.

To get the maximum visibility, we advise you to post square pictures. As Facebook auto-resize your pictures to generate the thumbnails, rectangle pictures will show up in the news feed as smaller pictures compared to square ones.

Here is how to do the same with your own pictures :

1. Resize your picture to 778 pixels wide
2. Put 4 vertical guides on your pictures at 241, 267, 510 and 536 pix (x axis). These guides represents the margins Facebook will insert between your pictures.

3. Create a square selection of 243×243 pix. Place it in the middle of your picture.

4. Add an horizontal guide at the top of your square selection

You will now need to crop three 243×243 pixels square.

5. Move your 243×243 square selection to the left edge of your picture. Make sure the top of your selection is right on the horizontal guide. Crop the first picture and save it (jpeg)

6. Move your 243×243 square selection to the middle of your picture, between the horizontal guide and the second and third guide. Crop and save this new square picture.

7. Move again your 243×243 selection and move it to the right edge of your picture. Crop and save.

8. Finally, publish a new album in Facebook by adding your three pictures. Add the relevant texts and description (you can even insert links into the description field!)

9. You’re done!

To help you, we’ve produced this Photoshop Facebook Album Template. Download it, it’s free!

If you have any Facebook tip to share, feel free to contact us! 

Looking for inspiration to create engagement on your Facebook page ? Look no further! 

We have compiled 150 Facebook Pages Case Studies, that you can sort by industry or brand.

Access the Facebook Pages case studies now

Facebook announced it a few months ago, and now it’s live for most of us : Facebook now updates Insights data in real-time. Well almost. The updates are every 15 minutes AND not all the Insights metrics are updated in real-time. To be precise, most aren’t.

So here is below the full list of the Facebook Insights metrics that are currently available in real-time through the API. Most are also available through Facebook Insights.

As you will see, all the metrics updated in real-time are related to the posts of the page, not the page itself (except one).

Question is : what are you going to do with these ?
In our opinion, except if you’re using an external Facebook Analytics solution with dedicated real-time features, they are pretty useless.

What’s your opinion ?

During their latest major Insights update, Facebook added the “Friends of Fans” metric. There is quite a lot to be said about it.

In his latest article, Thomas Baekdal said “(Friends of Fans) is completely and utterly useless”. We couldn’t agree more. 

Thomas explains why you should forget about Friends of Fans with great details, but here is a summary :

• Friends of Fans is a pure vanity metric. It shows you how many people you could reach IF 1)100% of you fans see your post AND 2)100% act on it. Probability it may happen : 0%.
• Friends of Fans doesn’t include people interacting with your posts who are neither Fan nor Friend of a fan. Any Facebook user can go to your page and interact with your post. Any Facebook user can also go to your website and comment/like/share your content (if Open Graph is enabled). They are not included in your Friends of Fans total.
• Friends of Fans doesn’t include Friends of Friends of Friends of Fans. Virality doesn’t stop at Fans + their circle. Ideally, you want to reach the friends of your fans but also the friends of the friends of your fans. And so on. And so on.