On March 6, Facebook oh so quietly updated its Facebook Page Terms and, for once, the news is good for marketers (maybe not so good for unsuspecting consumers whose brands will respond by going overboard). Restrictions that once made it difficult for your Facebook Page to operate as, well, a business have now been removed. Now you are allowed to do the following with your Page cover photos:
Post price and purchase information
Post contact information
Reference Facebook native features such as “like” and “share”
Calls to action (yeah, we know, why was that ever banned?)
The removal of these restrictions isn’t a free for all just yet, though. The new terms state the obvious fact that you probably shouldn’t be posting a cover image that’s deceptive, misleading, or, you know, infringing on somebody’s copyright. Less obvious, however, is the fact that you can’t encourage people to upload the cover to their own timeline, and you can’t take up more than 20 percent of the image with text.
We’ve always emphasized that it’s important to get visitors off of Facebook and onto your own properties, and that this should always be goal number one.
It’s not that Facebook impressions alone don’t lead to sales. Quite the opposite, actually. A study conducted by Datalogix and, yes, Facebook, found that the vast majority of sales came from Facebook impressions, not clicks. While there’s reason to suspect bias here, impressions certainly do play a huge part in sales, even in the absence of clicks.
However, an audience that visits your site directly, rather than your Facebook page, is even more engaged. These visitors are seeing your branding messages without the distraction of Facebook. If they subscribe to your newsletter, they are far more likely to actually see your messages in the first place than if they merely “like” your Page on Facebook. That means more impressions, and therefore more sales.
Now that we can add a call to action and contact information to the header, we can dramatically improve the usefulness of Facebook as a customer acquisition channel. Now that calls to action are allowed, you can link over to an email subscription, and entice users with a direct request. This leaves a lot more room for testing. Use Google’s URL Builder to tag your links and attribute visits to your Facebook cover.
We wouldn’t place too much emphasis on enticing users to “like” your Page, however. Dozens of studies and our own experiences have taught us that Page likes rarely, if ever, correlate with sales or anything else meaningful. Only 7 percent of the people who “like” your Page will ever even see another message from you, the way that Facebook’s algorithm is set up, and less than 1 percent will take an action of any kind.
A “like” is not a step in the buying funnel, so place the emphasis on the things that matter. How many impressions are you getting? How many repeat visits are you getting? What’s the correlation with sales? Now that you can do some direct marketing on Facebook, the opportunity is better than ever.