• by Jamie Tedford , Op-Ed Contributor, June 17, 2014

In a recent article, Newcastle Brown Ale brand director Quinn Kilbury revealed “ the Secrets of Facebook Advertising.” Cheers, Mr. Kilbury, for first and foremost having created a stellar creative campaign. It’s through work like this that you and Facebook’s Chief Creative Officer Mark D’Arcy continue to prove social media can, and should, brew award-worthy ad campaigns. But also, a toast to you for finally telling it like it is. Rather than pausing to lament the reported loss of organic reach, you’re running with the new world of marketing on Facebook -- and coming out ahead of the game for having done so.

Other brands would be wise to take a page out of your book and realize that big results are still possible on Facebook (by the way, they were never gone), just as long as you play by the new rules of Facebook marketing:

Content is still king: Well-written words, powerful images, and engaging videos are still, and always will be, the building blocks of successful advertising. The same cannot be said, however, of generic messaging. Powerful content performs well, but powerful and hyper-relevant content performs even better. Leverage unpublished page posts to segment your message to the exact right audience. If people can expect to see relevant content from their family and friends on Facebook, why should the case be different for what they see from brands?

You can still publish for free: Sure, build out your page with organic content. As Newcastle demonstrated, there’s nothing wrong with posting without promoting. Just know that you've got to amplify strong-performing posts to really gain more exposure and traction. In fact, promotion is often most effective when paired on top of organic content. I mean that paid content doesn’t always have to be pre-planned (though it’s smart to have set campaigns as well). Posts that do well organically tend to do exponentially better when amplified. So, see how a post is performing, and if it starts to outshine other posts organically, keep the ball rolling with paid media.

News matters: Think about your Facebook marketing as an extension of your integrated marketing strategy. Facebook and PR efforts shouldn’t be siloed, but instead should be coordinated to feed into one another’s success. For Newcastle, this meant timing conversations do media events fueled conversations for future Facebook posts. More importantly, it meant fine-tuning the brand’s Facebook page to be ready for the onslaught of traffic brought about by its increased news exposure.

Data is absolutely necessary: For Newcastle, success hinged on its ability to dig deep into data to perform multivariate message testing, scrutinizing everything from featured videos to message font. These results were analyzed intelligently and used to adjust posting strategy moving forward. Data also had a hand in the work after the fact, as sales were closely monitored in correlation with the Facebook campaign. This is exactly the type of data-in and data-out marketers need to approach with Facebook, both creating more informed campaigns through data-in, and measuring ROI with data-out.

While Newcastle isn’t the only brand embracing the new rules of Facebook marketing, I have to applaud its strategists for being so upfront and sincere with their approach. To likewise achieve success on Facebook, we too need to adapt rather than resist. It’s only then that marketers can really tap the potential of Facebook, to borrow a phrase -- no bollocks.