With 350 million users, Facebook is the biggest social media network in history. Your customers are out there, take advantage of the chance to connect with them. The best way to establish your brand on Facebook is with a fan page. If you have had a personal account on Facebook, you will see pretty quickly a fan page is not the same. Personal pages have friends, fan pages have fans. Anyone can become a fan without waiting for approval. Fans can post reviews of your business or product right on your page. Don’t worry, if they say something you don’t like, you can delete it. You can send out notifications to your fans if there are less than 2000 of them.
Fan pages need to be connected to personal pages. If you are uncomfortable with having your personal information displayed along with the corporate page, you can set your personal settings to private. Another way around this is to set up a ghost account for corporate use and connect the fan page to it. Even though ghost accounts are against the Terms of Service, it’s still better than having an employee use their account. The user who sets up the fan page is forever connected to it. Other users can be set up and removed as admins, but not the originating account.
A few tips to help get your fan page going:
- Look up your customers and friend them. Invite your friends to become fans. Try to update the page at least weekly.
- Get a vanity url. This option will be available after you get 25 fans. A vanity url is a shorter and easier to use. For example, http://facebook.com/korbyimagery is better than http://www.facebook.com/pages/Moorhead-MN/Korby-Imagery/170215538252.
- Add a profile picture. The best size is 200 pixels wide by 600 high. Try to set up the photo so the part that shows up in the icon still makes sense.
- Change the tabs! You have all the control over your page, so get rid of those useless tabs. Add tabs of your own. You can have Twitter or YouTube importing right into a Facebook tab.
- Add photos. People love photos. Tag your customers. When a person is tagged, they will get a notification and probably visit your page.
- Link to your website from your fan page.
Ever wonder why you see some people’s status updates and not others?
Facebook uses an algorithm that decides which updates you probably want to see. If you have never commented on someone’s status updates, you will probably stop seeing those updates after a while. On the other hand, if you want to stop seeing someone’s updates without unfriending them, you can do that in the time line. When you hover over an update, a hide button will display on the right side. If it is Farmville or some other annoying application that you are trying to hide, the option will pop up to hide the person or the application.
Leave a comment with the link to your new fan page.
