I'm relatively new to using Facebook for my business, but I love how the new version of Facebook Pages allows me to participate in two distinct ways:
- Logging in as my personal profile, I can interact with friends and family, or follow companies that I have a more personal interest in as a consumer/greyhound lover/foodie, whatever.
- Logging in as my business's fan page, I can interact with my colleagues, follow companies or people I admire, and - most importantly - meet and engage with people who might need my help with their content marketing.
In her blog post, How to Use the Facebook Photo Viewer as a Marketing Tool, Mari Smith suggests a very clever enhancement to this new layout. If you add "calls to action" (as text) to your photos, and upload them to your Fan Page, theyll be added automatically to the new photo viewer at the top of your profile.
Then, when someone clicks on any of your photos, a scrollable "lightbox" pops up, and viewers can read your photo's caption (where - ah-hah - you can place a clickable link to a webpage).
The size and shape of the photo are important (Mari gives details on dimensions) and I found that the spacing of the text made a difference as well.
After some trial and error, my third effort was, I believe, my most successful:
So are you ready to hear how a self-described "graphically-challenged" writer made this happen in such a relatively short amount of time, and with completely free online tools? Here are the steps I took:
First, I searched for photos at stock.xchang - it can be hit and miss, but I usually find something (and if I don't, I'll go with iStockphoto). Hint: Start your search with the emotions you want to capture - i.e., the pain of having the problem you're trying to solve, or the joy of solving it. Then add another search term about your topic.
As an example, check out one of my other Facebook photo ads. I found this photo with the two search terms "frustrated" and "computer."
Next, I uploaded the photo into Picnik, where I added the text and resized it per Mari's suggestions. Here is a brief video demo of how I did that:
Honestly, if I did this, you can do it! Why not give your Facebook visitors the opportunity to learn more about what you have to offer?
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