It’s Facebook Friday — each week we’ll offer one tip for leveraging Facebook to increase customer awareness of and engagement with your brand or business. This week we’ll discuss strategies for Liking and tagging other brands’ Facebook Pages with your own, and the reasons why that can benefit you.

Facebook’s ad dashboard has become increasingly more complicated to use, especially for small businesses that are unable to work with a Facebook ad rep or third-party partner.

To remedy this, the social network will begin testing a “promote” button that will enable you to create Sponsored Stories directly from your Page. Sponsored Stories are different from Facebook Ads in that you can organically insert mentions of your company into the News Feeds and the News Ticker.

The promote button will be placed within your publisher — which is where you go to update your status or share photos. It will also appear on posts that have already gone live within your Timeline.

Only recently has Facebook began encouraging small businesses to spend money on engaging existing fans. Consumers are connecting with more people and Pages than ever before. Due to the surge in content creation, the average Page post only reaches 16 percent of fans.

By promoting your content, you’re helping to increase awareness for your brand throughout the network. Currently there’s no way to target non-fans using the promote button; however, if your fans comment on or Like this content, their friends might see that activity as a Sponsored Story.

It’s just as important to reach existing fans as it is to acquire new ones. Although Facebook offers premium advertising solutions, it’s not always a feasible option for small businesses on a budget. The company is currently testing this feature with a limited number of businesses, but plans to expand availability as it receives more feedback.

Was this tip helpful? Do you have any more ideas for getting the most out of Facebook? Let us know in the comments!

[Via: Inside Facebook]