Facebook is huge, with over 400 million users now it’s the place to be, both personally and for your business. Love it or hate it, you need to get yourself in Facebook shape quick.
You likely already have a personal profile on Facebook. In this session I’ll take you how to set up a Facebook Page for your business or brand and how to work it.
There are now more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook and half of these are local businesses.
According to Facebook the average user becomes a fan of 4 pages every month. That means exposure for you, your cause, your organization and your business.
Free for all
That double entendre was implied. I can’t get over the fact that people shy away from Facebook and think it’s a waste of time. For a start it’s FREE. With realtime feeds it’s also one of the largest search engines and a fantastic place to monitor the latest trends from real people – your potential customers.
A Facebook page acts as a free mini website so on the off chance you don’t have your own, then use Facebook. You can share information, links, photos, videos, poll your fans, run competitions, start discussions, feed your blog and twitter posts to it and more. No technical knowledge required.
Let’s start the Facebook workout.
Exercise 1. Create a Facebook Page
The easiest way is to just go to www.facebook.com/pages to set one up.
When you’re choosing the type of Page it’s important that you pick the right name as you won’t be able to change this later. Then it’s all up to you – have fun, get creative and make sure you target your message to the right audience.
Top Tip: Once you have 100 fans you can acquire your own `vanity’ URL with your business name so it’s much easier to search for you, e.g facebook.com/womanzworld
Exercise 2. Make Your Facebook Page Unique
The most effective Facebook Pages create unique fresh content on a regular basis. It’s not about replicating what’s on your website, or putting out the same messages that you may already promote via email and twitter. I learned that over time!
Courtesy of Wildfire App
It’s about getting personal and creating content that will build a community, showcase your own personality, or that of your business and engage with your fans. Check out Entrepreneurs Inc page and click on Vitamin Water’s page shown here.
Depending on what your organization does, this could mean anything from sharing fun facts about you, your business or a relevant topic, posting details of an upcoming event your holding or attending through to publishing pictures of recent work, a new product release or a customer you’ve worked with.
Exercise 3. Be Active
Use your Facebook page to give people an insight to the real you and what your business does. Publish insightful and interesting information in your status updates, ask your fans what they think with polls or when you post videos, photos or other links.
Ask your fans to utilize the Share options when you publish to your Wall, so that friends in their networks can also find out about your organization.
Exercise 4. Start talking
In order to build a community on Facebook you need to start and continue a conversation. You’re the voice of your business or organisation, so speak up. You don’t need to respond to every comment or question but you need to remain engaged.
Sometimes your fans will work on your behalf and answer for you and keep the conversation going, this all drives activity to your page.
Advanced Workout – go on push yourself!
Exercise 1. Be Insightful
If you go to > Edit Page you’ll a handy feature called `Insights Dashboard’. Here you can also analyze how fans are interacting with your page which gives you instant feedback on what your fans are doing.
As with any analysis tool it important to monitor your Facebook Page to see what’s working and what’s not. Do your video posts get more comments than your blog posts? Are you getting any comments at all? Keep up to date with what’s happening and work it to your advantage.
Exercise 2. Create multiple points of contact
Make sure your page has calls to action that allows fans to interact with you on other forms of media. Ask them to sign up to your newsletter, get them to connect with your on Twitter, visit your website, your YouTube channel and visit your blog.
If you have a blog you can actually sync it directly with your page. You just need to install the `Notes’ application and add it as a tab on your page and it will automatically feed in.
Even better is verifying your blog with Networked Blogs, then you can install this app on a tab and it feeds your blog in a much more visually appealing format.
The same applies to Twitter. You can also install the Videos app or even the YouTube one to directly link your accounts.
Exercise 3. Buy a Facebook Ad
If done right, those ads you see on the right-hand side of Facebook are an effective way to increase your fan base or visits to your page OR website. Given Facebook made $225M via them in 09 then it’s clear people are finding advertising effective. To set one up go to facebook.com/ads
I recently started using them for FundRazr and was impressed at how effective they were at driving potential users of our app. They are super simple to set up and activate, you just need a succinct and compelling message as the word limit is small and an image, which is optional.
You can also do some amazing targeting of your audience and get very niche or go extremely broad. For example females in Paris aged 34-44 who are interested in tennis and wine. There’s a lot of flexibility.
The cost per click through rates are pretty high but you can set your budget to reflect what you can work with, and you can pause, edit and delete them at any time – we all knows as entrepreneurs like to think we’re in control ……
Exercise 4:
Use the Wildfire Application to run customised sweepstakes and campaigns on your page for a reasonable price. Use the FundRazr app to collect payments, sell tickets or run a fundraising campaign. For an example of an innovative campaign check out my birthday competition!
Stay tuned for Friday when we discuss Toning Up With Twitter. Feel free to post any questions or comments below too.
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I now have over 100 fans on my biz page, but I don’t see where you can customize your URL?
Also the Entrepreneurs FB Page has a “News” tab, and I can’t find the info. anywhere on FB on how you add that… do you have any idea?
Thanks!
Ragan
Hi Ragan
Great work on reaching 100 fans. You need to visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ and set your Page name.
For the Entrepreneurs page they’ve installed the `Involver app’ that allows them to feed in their RSS of their blog. You can do the same using Involver or I use Networked Blogs which I registered to have my blog on and it feeds it in a visually appealing way. You can view it here facebook.com/womanzworld
An even simpler version is to use the Notes application that’s part of your page and set your blog to feed into there. If you go to Edit Page you’ll see it under applications.
I hope that helps!
Natalie
Natalie – Great and educational information on Facebook. Thank you for helping the reluctant entrepreneur jump in the social networking water.
Excellent article regarding Fan pages. I agree with you on utilizing them for your business and increasing awareness. Plus the pages are excellent for increasing search engine views. I was surprised when I actually started looking at my stats to see how many views I am receiving each day. Facebook just started emailing you the page stats, so that’s pretty neat also.