Inside Facebook

Facebook launched a Page for media properties yesterday that includes best practices, tools to drive traffic and other insights for promoting news on Facebook. The Page launched earlier this month and currently has more than 1,100 Likes.

The media Page joins several other company-run Pages Facebook has launched in the recent past, including the Comedy Page, Politics Page, Global Relief and U.S. Congress Page.

In a blog the company announced that it’d conducted an analysis of the 100 top media sites utilizing Facebook’s social plugins and developed a list of best practices.

Some of these include publishing earlier or later in the day for higher engagement, including thumbnail photos of a user’s friends for three-to-five times higher click-through rates, placing the Like button at the top and bottom of news items and using social plugins above the fold on multiple web pages to increase clicks up to ten fold. Also, stories that revolve around visceral topics or big sports events see two-to-three times more activity than other stories.

As for how media properties should manage their Facebook presence, the blog  suggested that posting simple questions or encouraging users to Like a story increased activity two or three fold. These types of insights are sure to be useful to media companies, which as we previously reported, have begun to see increases in traffic as a direct result of Facebook’s social plugins.

The Media Page includes information for developers, such as tips on how to drive engagement, as well as advice for journalists on how to drive traffic on Facebook. Many more insights about driving Facebook traffic can be found in the Inside Facebook Marketing Bible.