Keeping up with all the changes going on in the world of social media, or even in the singular world of Facebook, is a task. Instead of trying to keep up with and report on every little tweak, I like to focus on and test out the things that I think will give me the greatest bang my time buck and then share those with you.

With that in mind, here are three simply Facebook tips that I think you can easily benefit from employing right now.

1) Use images for updates

I always like to experiment with ways to get more views and engagement and it’s clear that images win. I think most people know that and most people add images to their posts, particularly if they are sharing a blog post or video that already has an image – it simply gets put in as a thumbnail for the content.

What I’m talking about though is actually using a photo upload as your type of status update and then filling in the content and link of your blog post. I notice that when I do this I get both more views and more engagement.

Facebook seems to favor images over other forms of content.

So, upload that awesome image you used in your blog post and then share the title description and link in the say something about the photo box. (Same seems to be true for Google+ too since the image is so much more prominent.)

2) Use tab calls to action

To the right of the About box you’ll see images for all of your current pages and apps or what used to be called tabs. You can now have 12 apps and pages listed and the first four will show up on this bar.

Here’s the cool trick for this one. Now you get to create images for these apps instead of simply using the default app or page images. So now if you want to send someone to a page to grab a free eBook you can use an image to create a call to action. You simply open the page and hit edit settings and then upload a 111 x 74 pixel image that you want to represent your page. You can rearrange the order of the tabs to make the four most important stand out.

3) Use scheduled posts

It’s funny, but I remember when this action was shunned by social media types and now it’s standard accepted practice. Facebook added this feature a bit ago and since so many people had created their own routines using tools like Buffer it didn’t get much attention.

Facebook won’t come out and say it, but they definitely seem to favor content that is posted directly over that posted by 3rd party tools. Since they recently started displaying to admins how many people viewed your content I know off hand that my direct content gets 30-50% more views then content from Buffer.

Recently I started playing with scheduling posts rather than auto posting from another tool and sure enough, the scheduled post get seen by greater numbers.

Scheduling is a bit tedious, but not that hard. Just post as you normally would but hit that little clock in the lower left corner of the post box and tell Facebook when you want the post to go live.