We're tired of seeing print media being painted as dinosaurs, unable to adapt to new concepts such as social media. Whether you're a Tribune Company conglomerate serving millions or The Niche Report serving 25,000 users, there is a killer Facebook strategy for your publication. We're going to unlock that for you here.

Where you are now

You have an existing print subscriber base, a website audience and probably a Facebook page. Maybe you have even integrated social widgets into website and used email marketing to get more users onto Facebook. 

You probably don't have many Facebook fans – but you should. In fact, you should have 5 times as many Facebook fans as your circulation if your base is paid or 3 times as many if you're a free publication. So if you have 20,000 paying subscribers, you should be at 100,000 fans. More on why in a bit.  

You also should know what a Facebook fan is worth to you. How many of your existing subscribers are connected with you on Facebook? How many people discover you through Facebook and then subscribe?  How much of your content is shared via social media channels, which in turn drives how much traffic and ad/subscriber revenue? How much overlap is there with your website traffic? How effective is your advertising budget?

If you don't know the answer to these questions, you can't formulate your strategy, nor can you measure its impact.

The emotional seed

Why do people come to you now? Are you the industry authority on a topic –or perhaps the most comprehensive source, have the best authors, the widest distribution, or some other differentiating factor? That's what you'll leverage in Facebook, except instead of just regurgitating your print media online, you'll put a social twist on it.

Understand that Facebook is where people connect with their friends, so your tone has to match that.  Also consider that Facebook success is dependent upon you making an emotional connection with users – NOT via a purely factual, information-sharing type of relationship.

Let's say you have an article about how pending government regulations will affect your audience. The print version may go into detail of the ruling, how it impacts you, and what you can do about it.  But to have success on Facebook, you can't just post a link to the article.  

You have to connect as a friend – as if you're one-on-one having coffee together.  Post the link, but also ask them what they think – are they outraged or excited?  You want to ask for participation – this is a two-way street, not just you blasting content at them.

The viral loop

Facebook has a metric called Post Quality Score, as well as an EdgeRank algorithm. It's a measure of influence and engagement. The more users you have, the more objects you can touch. The average Facebook user has 130 friends.  So if there are 10,000 fans of your publication's Facebook page (not your profile), then you can reach 130,000 people. If you have 100,000 people, you can effectively touch 1.3 million people, many of whom are interested in what their friends are doing.

Your ability to touch those other people is dependent upon a few factors. First, your Post Quality Score (available at facebook.com/insights) is roughly a measure of the percentage of your users who are interacting with you. So when you ask a question, you get a higher engagement rate than by just making statements. 

When Facebook notices that people are discussing a topic, they will begin to promote it within the News Feed – and that's when you get the viral multiplier.  Those effects can be tremendous. Our president's father, a decorated police officer, died two weeks ago. His 13-year-old grandson made a Facebook page that has been viewed 30 million times.  Magic?  No – the mechanics of viral engagement were such that police officers who shared the story triggered Facebook's algorithm to share the story with other police officers.  And now there are 68,000 cops and cancer survivors who are fans of the page.

The offer

Sometimes the easiest way to get participation is via a contest or discount. You effectively short-circuit Facebook's algorithm by temporarily loading it up with engagement, especially if participating and sharing are a condition of entry.  JVC did this to great effect, and the same mechanic will work for you – even if you’re not selling HDTVs or camcorders.  Maybe you can give away some free subscriptions to your magazine, a dinner for two, or a free consulting session with one of your authors. Facebook does have promotional guidelines, so read them carefully. There are companies like Wildfire that provide contest applications inside Facebook, but you can run your own quite easily.

While contests drive a lot of initial traffic, that traffic is often of low quality. Clearly, there are folks entering just because they want the prize – not because they want to subscribe to your magazine. To mitigate the risk, consider the prize to be something that only an avid reader would appreciate. So don't give away an iPad or mass consumer item unless you are a consumer electronics firm.

The second touch

A lot of publications have made it through the first three steps we’ve discussed so far: establishing an emotional connection, asking for participation and having a contest of some sort.  But where nearly everyone falls flat on their face is during the next step: the second touch.  In other words, you've invested time and money to build up 50,000 fans (or whatever figure represents market dominance in your particular niche).  Now what?  To not deepen the relationship is to invite your friends to your open house, but never say hello to them again.  How rude!  

Once they're a fan, it's time to get them into a Facebook application. Perhaps you have a subscription form, a series of interesting polls, a mortgage calculator, or something beyond the random participation on your fan page’s wall.  You can add these features through custom tabs.  The Niche Report, for example, is a publication for mortgage brokers that has custom tabs allowing people to subscribe and view a landing page.  If you don't have at least a landing page, then your users are relegated to the wall, which includes only the last dozen random things posted by yourself and your fans.  

Companies like WebTrends sell off-the-shelf apps starting at $1,500 each all the way up to $50,000 for a custom design. If you're Zynga, the maker of Farmville and MafiaWars, you might spend millions to create a full-on video game experience.  But for most publications, a simple landing page tab for $300-500 should be a great start.

Thus, the second touch is moving participation beyond just becoming a fan. You can increase your second stage engagement by running a light Facebook ad campaign targeting only your fans (yes, you can do that) and by building a couple of apps to get people to do whatever it is you consider a deeper conversion.

Measure it

Ultimately, your marketing must be measurable such that you know exactly how every penny of advertising and labor has been spent and what it has produced.  On Facebook, you'll want to use Google Analytics (if you're low budget and want an awesome free product) or a high-end solution like WebTrends.

Make sure you calculate the spillover effect, which measures how many folks who were first touched via Facebook eventually flowed through another channel – direct sales, paid search, email marketing, organic search, and so forth. The "how did you hear about us" question is sometimes effective for your subscribers, but a coupon code is better, because it’s more accurate and more trackable.

When you know what an incremental sale is worth and what it costs, factoring in the value of strong ad deals from a larger subscription base, then you have an ROI-effective strategy on Facebook.

Dennis Yu is CEO of BlitzLocal, a performance agency that specializes in Facebook advertising for large brands and agencies. You can contact him at dennis@blitzlocal.com.