Great post on All Facebook about how supermarket tabloid Weekly World News went from 3,244 fans to 40,310 fans in four days — and aliens had nothing to do with it.

The post by Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal, offers some simple tips of how when you’re doing your Facebook marketing you can take advantage of the changes the social network introduced at F8 with the arrival of the “like” button, which replaced the “become a fan ” — which was adopted by a whopping 50, 000 sites in a week.

The key thing here, as the post points out, is that users no longer know exactly what they are “liking” when they click on “like” — whether it is the content in the social ad, the fan page or website it links to.

The change appears to have sent click-to-fan conversion rates sky rocketing. Weekly World News saw its rates move into the 50-90% range. World Weekly News came up with eight rules and they are all worth paying attention to.

RULE #1: Ask users to like you in the ad

Highlight your great content and try as you would in any advertising variations of copy. Weekly World News experimented with capitalising the word “LIKE” and kept it simple.

RULE #2: Send users to your Facebook page

You’re on Facebook and the idea here is to build your presence and the strength of your brand on the social network so don’t send people elsewhere.

RULE #3: Create an incentivised LIKE page

This a great tip. Weekly World News took advantage of the fact that Facebook allows you to show one thing to people who are fans and something else to those who aren’t.

If you’re putting great content on your Facebook page then tease non-fans with it to get them to “like” you.

Weekly World News says it found that incentivised “like pages” got 200-300% higher click-to-fan conversion rates compared to than regular landing pages.

RULE #4: Do NOT send users to your wall

It equates this with sending Google AdWords traffic to your homepage instead of a PPC landing page. Send them instead to your incentivised like page – which should be your incentivised landing page.

RULE #5: Rotate your ads DAILY

Those ads get old fast on Facebook so change the content. World Weekly News said it saw click thru rates fall by as much as 50% within 24 hours. Keep an eye on the CTR and respond to your creative accordingly.

Rule #6: Optimize primarily to cost per fan (CPF), not just CTR or CPC

It is about getting the most relevant users not the most click throughs. WWN used its own software to do this.

Rule #7: Separate into test and production campaigns

“When you have a group of ads that are performing, place them in a separate production campaign with a high budget, while you test in a low budget campaign. There are no ad groups in Facebook– just ads and campaigns.”

Rule #8: Send updates regularly to fans

Most companies users Facebook tend to post Wall updates to keep in touch wiht fans and do not use the email function: “Send an Update to Fans?”. Facebook is offering you the chance to send real emails. Use it. Sparingly. Great point. This is so often overlooked while your friends abuse this all the time.

Final point, WWN estimates that a Facebook fan “is worth twice as much as an email list subscriber” because almost half of Facebook users log in every day.

With this knowledge in mind it says to think of “building your fan base as a giant list builder with these social options for free”.