As we are well aware, Facebook is everywhere. Almost everywhere you go, there are references to it. Nearly every website you click on has a button saying, “Like Us On Facebook!”. Most importantly, chances are that if you’re an inbound marketer, you’ve probably jumped on the Facebook bandwagon as well. Millions upon millions of businesses use Facebook in their inbound marketing strategy.
If you happen to be one of the inbound marketers for one of these millions of businesses, then you probably know the ins and outs of Facebook. Did you know that there is one simple click of a button that can save your business both time and money, while keeping up with the latest information? By clearing the Facebook cache, your inbound marketing material is updated with any changes you have made to the inbound marketing material after you have posted the link on Facebook.
Allow me to further explain… The idea of inbound marketing is to drive people to your website and build them up into being leads and eventually customers, right? So when you use Facebook for inbound marketing, generally you post links to blogs and articles that are on your business’ website (see ours for example www.facebook.com/contensive). Say you write a fabulous article on Inbound Marketing, you post it on your webpage with a nice link to a landing page. Your next inbound marketing move is to login to your social media accounts and share your amazing article right? So you login to Facebook and paste your link onto a new post, write a quick summary or even just the title, “The Greatest Inbound Marketing Advice You’ll Ever Hear!”, and click post. Job well done right? Nope. There are a number of things that can go wrong. There could be just the tiniest detail that your boss wants you to tweak, or maybe you catch a mistake, or decide the photo isn’t quite right… Whatever it is, you make the changes, because of course you want your work to be perfect. The trouble is, any changes you make to a page linked to Facebook are a moot point if you do not clear your Facebook cache, which makes all of your hard work in inbound marketing kind of sad.
Now I’ll break this down even further. Since you are so efficient at inbound marketing, you probably sat down to start your next article as soon as you’ve finished the edits from your last one. While you’re busy creating new material, your valued advocates, fans, customers, friends and colleagues are (hopefully) reading your previous post, liking it, commenting on it and most importantly, sharing the link with EVERYONE they know. Here is where you need to pay attention. You’re a savvy inbound marketer so you know how to network with other inbound marketers, who in turn do the same. Someone you know absolutely loves your article and shares it to their Facebook page. Then someone they know clicks on the link to your article on “Inbound Marketing”, but instead of seeing the final product, and being totally wowed, the reader sees your original article, which in some cases can actually be detrimental to your inbound marketing campaign. What if it wasn’t a simple change that you made? What if you needed to update a statistic? Your reader would receive wrong information, which would most likely lead them elsewhere. This is precisely why it is important to refresh your Facebook information for inbound marketing
Clearing the Facebook cache is not the same as clearing it through Internet Explorer, Chrome, etc. There is actually a debugging page that Facebook uses to refresh individual links. The process is very simple, enabling you to get back to what you need to be doing, inbound marketing. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/ and all you have to do from there is paste the link to your article (or anything edited in the past) to the debug page and click “debug”. Now your inbound marketing material is up to date, and you can actually see a copy of the updated information that Facebook grabs from your page. Pretty fancy, huh? It’s just a tiny inbound marketing tip that can save you a lot of trouble later on, plus we want the best for our customers and potential customers, so why wouldn’t we want to ensure that have the most accurate and relevant information? This is definitely a key practice for any business’ strategy for inbound marketing.
-Meghann Kinshella
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