Facebook has undergone a few changes of late and is now a much more viral experience for you and your potential or existing customers (collectively called Fans in Facebook).
The new Facebook Business Page layout is divided into two distinct areas.
The left-most column is where your brand logo, business information summary, fans, links and admin links can be located. Make sure you write something interesting about your company in this left column. Be sure to include a link to your website here. Your description can be changed at any time, so this is also a great place to highlight a promotion or some other news about your company.
The right hand column is the certainly the largest and is divided into a series of tabs, with the Wall tab generally being the default view.
The Wall acts as a Twitter-style update feed that puts your business news directly on your Facebook Business Page.
When you are logged into Facebook and click Edit Page a third column appears containing blocks of advertising.
As you make changes, add links and share other information on your Facebook Business Page, it automatically appears in the new Wall feed.
Updates and Wall posts made by your fans are also shown in this Wall feed.
And any updates that you add also appear on all your Fans Walls, so this can be a truly viral experience.
Sign up for a Facebook Business Account
Go to the Facebook sign up page and create your Business Account – www.facebook.com. Once you are logged into Facebook, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Advertising,” and then click “Pages.” at the top of the page. There is some great information here, so take a moment to read through the information and when you are ready click “Create Page.”
As you go through the set-up process, remember that you must categorise your company in the right area to help people find you business.
Setting Up a Business Page
One of the first things you need to do when you set up a new Facebook Page is to give it a title. A tip with this is to think about using rich keywords related to your business that you would like to be found for. Use your own collection of keywords and choose the main one that currently attracts people to your website or blog. (If you need to produce keywords for your advertising campaigns try this free tool.)
You also want to choose a good, clear photo for your Facebook Page. This can be a personal picture or your company’s logo.
When setting up your page you will have to decide if you want visitors to be able to post messages for everybody to see or if you only want your own messages shown. It may be best to allow everything, as this will help to build your Wall content faster because people love to post messages.
When you are logged in and at the Wall, click Edit Page (under your Logo or picture) and edit the Wall settings. Select the options you require for your business.
If the posts become out of control or unflattering, you can always delete individual posts or change the settings later.
One of the great things about Facebook is the ease of set up.
Setting up a business page is really just about carefully finding your way around and following the various prompts.
Other Tabs
At the top of your new Facebook Wall you will see an Info Tab where you can create a full-length version of your company information.
There are also Tabs for Custom Facebook Applications that you choose to add to your Business Page, like RSS feeds Pictures and other applications.
Once you fill in all of the basic information, save everything. You have now successfully created your Facebook Business Page.
Provide Interesting and Useful Comments
It is important for you to let people know about your Business Page. This is where having an already active Business Page comes in handy because if you already have a lot of people who are interested in your Company, you can suggest your new Facebook Business Page to them.
Just like in other areas of social media (blog’s, linkden, twitter, etc), it’s extremely important to provide interesting content to your readers.
You should add fresh content and updates to your Facebook Business Page on a regular basis (daily or weekly). This will keep your fans returning to your page. And Fans that do return, are far more likely to become paying customers at some point.
When you update your Facebook Business Page you’ll need to find a good balance between getting your business message across to your Facebook Fans without commercially spamming them. Keep the updates light and useful rather than advertising-heavy.
Offering regular and useful content will naturally encourage interaction because you are giving people something to respond to. You don’t need to come up with all the content yourself, either. You might just link to an interesting article or blog post you have found on the web that’s related to your business or industry.
To help with this content creation you can also use an application like Notes to enter your blog’s RSS details so that it pulls your blog posts straight into your Wall. The Notes application can be found in the Application settings section of your facebook account (Edit Page/Applications/Notes).
Keep in mind that a user can simply click a little X beside your update in their news feed to hide all future news updates about you. So make your updates newsworthy and interesting but do not aggressively promote your business as other Facebook users will probably frown on this.
Ultimately, the more time you invest in your Business Facebook page, the better response you will get from it.
