As you know, the Facebook platform has posted such astonishing growth, I would look really stupid posting a number here that would be dated and quaint a month from now. Likewise, the platform’s stability is something to behold, as evidenced by this past weekend’s “land rush” for custom Facebook urls. (You can find me here, by the way…)

Given the tremendous opportunity to see significant reach, I felt it was time to share a gem of a secret about how to make your Facebook ad really shine.

First, let’s look at the ad as it appears on most Facebook pages:

The ad itself does not, at first glance, seem to have any miraculous mojo. You might have noticed it sitting idly on the right-hand edge of your page, and if you didn’t pay any attention, that’s just as well.

It’s a simple DIV, with three sections: the top line, meant to resemble other clickable links; the picture; and the teaser copy, with the voting arrows on a line break below.

The hidden markup is what makes this so interesting.

If you look at the actual code, and strip away the < deception > < /deception > tags, you get a very different (and more truthful) result:

With the < deception > markup missing, we see the real result of clicking on the advertisement. < deception > has been buried within HTML since the early days of the web, and is robust enough that Internet Explorer – even in its worst incarnation and configuration for meeting web standards – could still render it flawlessly.

< Deception > is one of the few rarely-used tags in little danger of being deprecated. It is too useful for those who employ it. The < sarcasm > and < irony > tags are often used on blogs today, although the comments section often turns those off inadvertently.

Extremely clever marketing, though.