This is a guest post by Rob Banagale. Rob Banagale is co-founder of Neutrinos, LLC, a digital media company specializing in iPhone application design and consulting based in Boston, MA. Rob advises clients on how they can extend their marketing reach to iPhone users, including the iPhone application publishing process. He has authored a Facebook application and remains interested in the design of social media platforms.

One of the most important parts of a person’s Facebook presence is their profile photo. This is displayed in the top left corner of a page. The photo can be a newly uploaded image or it may be drawn from any of your online albums.

Typically, a profile photo shows someone’s face, and appears in front of the light blue-grey line that connects from the left side of the profile to the left-most tab. View an example of a typical profile page with a normal photo.
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Over the past week there has been a bunch of buzz about what essentially are Facebook marketing hacks; quick “guerilla” tactics that help boost exposure to your profile or brand. Whether you are a small business or a big business, there are some quick “tricks” that can instantly gain you more exposure. These Facebook marketing hacks are not encouraged by Facebook and ultimately, I would assume that Facebook will develop filters for people gaming the system.

Facebook Marketing Hack 1: Tag Popular Friends in Photos

This trick has been written about extensively over the past week. A couple weeks ago, Sam Lessin posted about the topic on Advertising Age. This Facebook hack is pretty straight forward. You simply upload a photo which has some sort of promotional value in addition to a photo description which can be used for promotional purposes. Proceed to tag your most influential friends (friends with the most contacts), and submit the photo.

Facebook places a high priority on photo tagging when it comes to news feed stories so this is a great way for getting promotion. As I said before, this is gaming the system though and Facebook will inevitably develop tools to monitor this type of activity. If you abuse Facebook tagging, you may not only begin to receive warnings from Facebook that your Facebook account will be deactivated, but you could also anger your friends.

Back in July I suggested that Facebook enable brands to tag photos with their brand which links to their brand page. While individuals may get frustrated with brands over-tagging photos, the brands also risk annoying their customer base and this will be a disincentive for photo tag spamming.

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