This guest post is by Jenny Dean of Business Blog Writers.
You might have seen the ProBlogger post by Tommy Walker that talked about using photos to your advantage on Facebook. This post will add to some of Tommy’s ideas.
I have two websites, Floppycats.com and Antioxidant-fruits.com, and corresponding Facebook fan pages where I like to set up albums for the product reviews that I do on those sites.
Why having albums on a Facebook Fan page is important
- Opportunity: Since I feature a product every Tuesday, that’s pretty much 52 product reviews per year. That means 52 (or 53, depending on the year) opportunities for my sites’ Facebook fan pages to show up in people’s news feeds.
- Link love: You can link or tag the manufacturer’s Facebook page on each photo within your Album, which means you’ll get a link back to your Facebook page from theirs.
- Clickthroughs: You can add a link back to your website from your Fan page. I like to link back to the actual product review, so that users will visit the site if they are interested in learning more.
- Communication: You’ll get questions—and if you are doing product review albums like me, it might give you more insight on how to do your review, or provide you with feedback for the manufacturer, showing the manufacturer how valuable you are as a blogger for them.
- More fans: That’s right, when you link to the manufacturer, you never know who will see the link on the manufacturer’s page, and then will come and check out your Facebook Fan page—or your site.
In this article, I’m going to explain how to set up a successful Facebook album as well as how to tag and link photos in that album to the manufacturer’s Facebook Fan pages.
Setting up your album
Facebook has changed up a bit since Tommy’s post, so first, I’ll show you how to set up a Facebook album.
First you want to start from your blog’s (or business’s) Fan page. Under your photo, there is a category called “photos”. Click on that, and your photo section will appear.
To add an album, click on “Photos.”
Another page will open and on the right-hand said there is a button that says, “+ Create Album.” Click on that.
A dialog box opens, and you can start adding photos from your hard drive that are applicable to the album.
Adding photos to an existing album
Now, every Tuesday on my informational website about fruit, I do a product review on a product that has fruit in it. I have, of course, already created the album. Every week, either when I write a review or after the review has been published, I add a photo.
To add a photo to an existing Facebook album, simply click on the album (follow directions above) and then click on “Add Photos” in the upper right-hand corner once you are on the album page.
As I was writing this post, I decided to add the photo of the product that will make its debut on my blog this week: blazerfarmz Fresh Frozen Aronia Berries.
When the upload is complete, click on “Done.” Then, scroll to the bottom of “Edit Album—Product Reviews” until you find the image that you’ve just uploaded.
Enter the name of the product (you might want to throw in a keyword here, too, but since “aronia berries” is already a keyword for me, I don’t worry about it) and then include the URL link to your product review.
Then click on “Save Changes,” then “Publish.”
Once this image is published, Facebook will return you to the album in question. So then you want to go find the photo you just uploaded and click on it. When I do this, I can see that it has a product name and also a clickable link back to my product review. You might even want to make this link a bit.ly link, so that you can track the number of clicks.
Now, here comes the important part that will help you stretch your reach across multiple Facebook pages: you want to tag the manufacturer’s page in your photo.
When you’ve clicked on the photo and the photo is open on your screen, in the white section below the photo on the lower left side you will see a “Tag This Photo” link. Click on that.
Move your cursor over the photo and then click on it (anywhere is fine in this situation because there is only one product in the photo). Then start typing the name of the manufacturer. In order for this to work, you have to have already liked their page.
Select the manufacturer’s name (“blazerfarmz” in this case) and then click on “Done Tagging.”
You’ll see that “Blazerfarmz” has been tagged in the photo, which means your photo is now on their Facebook page. So all the fans of their page now have the opportunity to click on your photo as well as click on through to your review. My photo is on my page and on their page—it’s double the exposure for little effort.
If we go back to my album, you can see that I have several manufacturers tagged in my Product Review album.
Benefits of using Facebook albums
Some benefits of this approach to using Facebook’s albums include:
- Cross posting of photos with minimal effort creates much more exposure.
- It shows manufacturers that you have interest in them and are making an effort to expose their products.
- If you offer giveaways, product reviews, or advertising on your site, you could always add your Facebook albums as an added bonus to product owners. In other words, you will cover their products on your Facebook page and will include them in a permanent album where their product images will be located alongside those of other manufacturers. So if someone comes from one manufacturer’s Facebook page, they might discover other manufacturers’ products through your Facebook fan page.
An added touch
Something I like to do to finish it all off is to post my review on the manufacturer’s Facebook page. I like to do that from my Antioxidant-fruits.com account, though—I have to switch from my personal account to my Antioxidant-fruits.com account.
To switch accounts, go to the Account Tab in the upper right-hand corner, click it and choose, “Use Facebook as a Page.” A dialog box will open showing all your pages. Click on the one you want to use.
When you click on the switch, it will take you to your Facebook home page. Next, search for the manufacturer’s name using the search bar.
Then go to their page and type a message. I wrote, “Thank you to blazerfarmz for letting us review their awesome Fresh Frozen Aronia Berries over at @ant.” When you type the “@” symbol and your page’s name, the full page name will come up. You can select it, and it will link to your Facebook page.
I can also then include the URL of the YouTube video I did for the review. If I just copy the URL from YouTube, paste it into that field on Facebook, and then hit the space bar, a photo will appear from the video, and the link will be there too.
Then, click on “Share,” and you’ll see your message show up on their page. Here, I forgot to include a link to the actual review, so I added that in the comment section.
You can do the same on your page. The beauty of posting on your page and linking to their Facebook page with the “@” symbol is that that message will show up on the manufacturer’s wall too!
What ideas do you have for making the most of your blog site and photos on Facebook? I’d love to hear them!
Jenny Dean is a 31-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Kansas City. Jenny is currently working on Business Blog Writers, a company that supplies blog content specifically for company’s blogs, Floppycats.com, an informational website about Ragdoll cats and Antioxidant-fruits.com, an informational website about the antioxidant powers of fruit. Follow Business Blog Writers on Twitter or on Facebook.
Hi Jenny, Nice post and a very important tips to use Facebook albums. I still haven’t tried this but will try soon.
Nice Ideas.. I already Done this Facebook Technique..
Thanks for sharing..
Hi Jenny!
This is exactly what I’ve been looking for lately! I’ve been looking for a sort of new way to showcase reviews and I think this will be perfect! This is way more in-depth than I had originally thought, but this looks way better. Thank you for this!
Cool, Morgan. I hope you have great results.
I am one of those people who has failed to utilise Facebook – at all. In fact I can safely say I am not a Facebooker. However your article has surprised me with the extent of what can be achieved. perhaps it is time to dip a toe in the world of Facebook.
Or I could just wait and see what Google+ has to offer. Oh the choices!
Oh the choices is true! I think Facebook will still be important and more than likely you will have to cross post in both places – what a pain! But, my readership, for example, will take awhile to transfer to Google+, so I will need to keep up with both. My guess too, is that Facebook will step up their game to match Google+
This was the best tip re: social media that I have received in a VERY long time. Thanks!
I had no idea that you could tag other pages in your fan page photo’s this sounds like a fantastic way to draw in more likes! Thank you for sharing this.
Jenny, We use our Facebook albums as a portfolio to highlight projects we’ve done for our clients. Not sure why I haven’t thought of doing this with reviews! We’ll be adding new albums to our Facebook page soon. Thanks for the “Aha!” moment. Megan, we do similar things across multiple platforms targeted specifically at the segment of our/our clients’ audience that hangs out there. You might consider dipping your toe in multiple places if your bandwidth allows it. C’mon in, the water’s fine! ;)
Glad you found it helpful.
Thank you for this! I can’t wait to get home and do this to my reviews and use this for future reviews. It seems obvious after reading, it’s like a light bulb went off in my head!
Jenny this is awesome! Thanks for iterating on my original stuff, this is great!
The only word of caution I have to give, and this is only something I’ve learned recently, is there is a fine line between ethical tagging and tag spam. Make sure that you’ve built some sort of relationship with them.
In some of the larger Pages I admin, I do not hesitate to mark a tagged photo as spam, whereas if I have a relationship with the tagger I’ll have no problem promoting that same photo.
Tommy, good to know – all the reviews I do are of products that were sent to me by the manufacturer – so I would hope they wouldn’t mark me as spam! I, of course, also send out an email after the review to the manufacturer to let them know it is live on their site and that I have posted it on my FB and Twitter.
Wow, this is awesome – one of the most helpful step-by-step posts I have read in a while – I can’t wait to try this out!
Wonderful post! I have several Facebook pages that really needed these tips,. ;)
Thanks for the great tip.
You asked for some more ideas to make the most of facebook photos. One simple one is to simply watermark the photo with your URL. If the photo is interesting enough, I’m sure there will be people typing in the URL to your blog to see what else you have to share. =)
Do you have a way to quickly watermark your photos? I am NO expert with Photoshop – so if there’s an easy way to do it, I’d be interested.
Jenny I’m surprised. After all we use Facebook but never dived in deep enough to know what else it can offer. I’m surprised I’ve been missing so much. This is an excellent post and I’ve learned a lot from this post than from all the years I’ve been using Facebook.
James, I will be interested to know if it helps you. Please let me know if you think about it.
What a brilliant piece of information! Thanks for sharing :)
Going to put up a gallery now!
Dude you again reming me the importance but however i am away from facebook from a long period :)
This is one of the most POWERFUL piece of information that I have ever seen on Facebook marketing!
This is so simple yet I would not thought of it, the simple fact of tagging photos with a huge “manufacturer’s” tag puts your site out there to all those people…amazing. I learn so much here.
Hi – did it already and it works well. I always switch to our business profile when posting on related /other business FB pages! Thanks for this very detailed information !!!
Interesting post you have here. If I may add, doing such a process also helps your site’s SEO campaign as you put tags to these images and then allow them to link back to your site providing that silo that’s (in essence) the concept for which people go through extensively detailed campaign methods such as this. Cheers.
Yes, yes and yes again. Facebook is such a thriving network, that it would be a cardinal sin not to use its presence and availability. Way to go. Facebook guides the way, again. Thanks, Jenny.
Jenny,
What a great post. I work with Facebook pages for business clients every day and setting up albums can be a real chore. Thanks for the tips and keep up the great work.