1. Offer premium content. Lancôme lets visitors upload a photo and virtually try on makeup with its “magic mirror” app. Mercedes-Benz lets fans listen, download, and explore music from its long-running “Mixed Tape” series featuring up-and-coming artists.

2. Keep up the conversation. Brands on Facebook need to be sure to post to their wall regularly, so that they appear in the Facebook feeds of their fans. But not too regularly. Five to ten times a week, as brands like Swarovski do, is probably ideal. More than twenty times a week is overkill and annoying (hint: Oscar de la Renta). Responsiveness to customers is critical too. Brands like Aveda and Dewars make a point of replying to nearly 50% of all posts on their wall by fans.

3. Give customers a voice. It’s hard to interact with your customers on Facebook if you don’t give them a place to express themselves. Thousands of fan photos and videos can be found on BMW’s page.

4. Ask customers to be creative. The most savvy brands inspire their customers to do more than simply upload a pic of their favorite product. Jaeger-LeCoultre invites visitors to design a virtual piece of art featuring one their custom Reverso watches; BMW’s “2Originals” app invites you to create an original film with your Facebook photos to share with your friends.

5. Offer “gated” rewards to only your fans. Facebook’s functionality allows brands to offer specific content and pages that are visible only after “liking” the page—a nice way to attract fans, and reward those who love you most. Belvedere vodka’s landing tab offers photos from an exclusive “haus party” to those who click the “like” button. Oscar de la Renta offered free samples of its new fragrance at launch to Facebook fans only.

6. Integrate Facebook with the rest of your web presence (The Most Important). Facebook is only one part of a brand’s online presence. Smart brands like Audi integrate it with Twitter, YouTube, and their own websites, linking out to them from Facebook, and linking to Facebook prominently on their own websites. Brands like Tory Burch integrate Facebook into every product page on their own website, with a simple “Share” button.

7. Balance global and local. As with any media, international brands must balance global reach with local relevance to customers. The L2 study found that luxury brands that offer localized Facebook tabs or pages (Johnnie Walker has 33 different national pages) have much higher rates of interaction by their fans.

8. Tap into F-commerce. Facebook isn’t just for making friends. It’s good for selling too. Even brands that are not yet selling products entirely within their Facebook page can use it to showcase products, guide the customer to a purchase decision, and then transfer them back to their corporate site for the sale. Bulgari’s customers can browse products in Facebook and click to go directly to their purchase page on the company’s own website.

You can check out all these brands on Facebook!

This is the new hot tactic used by marketers nowadays to get their fan count up. They are constructing the “like” walls. A number of big brands, such as Macy’s, 1-800 Flowers, Bud Light, and Gap, practice it.

The logic behind this thinking is simple: We provide valuable incentives in return for the larger community on Facebook. Sounds fair, right? However, you are then faced with the dilemma: Do you want more Likes or do you want more advocates in your community who would have liked you no matter what monetary incentives you are trying to offer?

There are a lot of people out there who are looking to get a quick coupon or discount. After all, who doesn’t like free stuff? There are a number of businesses that offer a cool discount a day/a week on their Facebook page. It seems to work for them. But are they truly building relationships or are they just using their page to broadcast the deals and sell products? Unless you are prepared to offer your community a constant flow of coupons and discounts, the success of any single promotion will be short-lived. I would also question the quality of your fans and if they are truly present on your page. What you want is to build a community of advocates who truly participate, which means a consistent dialogue, smooth feedback loop, and your fans sharing their stories and their experiences with your brand. If you have a large community that is quiet—is it a good thing?

It used to be that un-liking a page was hard; it required several steps and was confusing. Now, it is as easy as clicking the unlike button. A number of brands reported a huge drop-off rate post-promotion. Consensus is that that drop-off rate is on average 50% after the promotion is complete. Meaning that those promotions don’t work. Meaning that you are diluting your fans and depreciating the value of your community.

So instead of “like-gating,” why don’t we provide our fans compelling content and relevant messaging? Why don’t we make it easy for our fans to interact with us and our content? Why not post happy holiday wishes, short trivia questions, interesting polls, and fun videos to help us say communicate our message and truly hear theirs? Why not make it easy and fun for them to share among their friends? And if we must build the “Like walls,” why not be very selective in how we do it?

If you are not creating valuable customer relationships, then does the fan count matter?

Tip #1

This first tip is so obvious you’ll wonder why I’ve included it, but it is amazing how many people don’t do this when using Facebook advertising. Always have a call to action on your Facebook ads. That’s means words to tell your user to take an action. For example, Click here, Call us today, Like us. These are all simple calls to action, and without these you will find your ads tend to have a lower click through rate.

Tip #2

When you create your ad, set it up to use cost per click, not cost per impression. Cost per click means you only get charged when someone physically clicks on your Facebook ad. Cost per impression means you get charged per 1000 impressions and the rate for this is much lower than cost per click. However if you’re new to Facebook advertising and your ads don’t have a high click through rate but do get lots of impressions, you’ll quickly find that changing to cost per click will save you a lot of money.

Tip #3

Facebook have a recommended bidding range when you create an ad. This means the price is for example between 0.30 – 0.70 per click. Try setting your bid to somewhere in the middle of this range when you create your ad. Then work out what your click through rate is. Your click through rate is the percentage of people who click on your ad, compared to the number of impressions. If you can improve your click through rate by changing parts of your ad and split testing, then Facebook will reward you by giving your ad more impressions.

Tip #4

Once you’ve managed to increase your click through rate by split testing your ads, try lowering your bid price. A good click through rate is roughly between 13% – 20%. The reason you should do this is because Facebook advertising reward a good click through rate with more impressions. So you can get the same number of impressions and clicks by lowering your bid price!

Tip #5

When you select your bid price don’t select obvious amounts like 0.25, 0.30, 0.35 etc. Try 0.26 or 0.31 as not as many people will bid on these prices.

These tips are all very small tweaks you can make to your Facebook advertising campaigns. They can really increase the effectiveness of your ads and keep you ahead of your competition. However be sure that you only include them as part of your overall split testing strategy.