Setting up a Facebook page
Do you have a Facebook profile? If you’re trying to market your business, do you have a Facebook page? Do you know the difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page? Following on from the previous ‘Setting up Twitter‘ post, here’s how to get going with Facebook.
As an Internet Marketing tool, Facebook is less flexible than Twitter. It’s not as customisable as Twitter and it’s harder to get followers or, in this case, fans. A Facebook page is for the sole purpose of marketing your business; a Facebook profile is for your own personal use, ie. a way of getting in back in touch with old friends, sending silly messages and ‘poking’ each other! It’s a good idea to separate your personal stuff from your business stuff on Facebook. That way your business connections don’t have to see how childish you can be and your personal connections won’t feel as though you’re constantly trying to sell them things. However, the search engines won’t rank the business page unless you have a personal profile set up first.
The good thing about having a Facebook business page is that it is viewable by anyone – they don’t have to have a Facebook account in order to view your page – and it can be ranked by the search engines. In which case, just like Twitter, it is again important to include keywords in your page title and any description that you may add. The page title needs very careful thought however as this cannot be changed. You can set up another page with a different or better title but then of course you would have to build up your fan base and information all over again.
The next thing to do is to get some fans. Without fans, the search engines will not rank your page very highly and neither will Facebook in its business page directory. The more fans you have, the more interactions the page is likely to get with fans and this is also valued by the search engines and Facebook. The problem is, you can only invite people to be a fan if they’re already on Facebook and then only if they are already amongst your Facebook friends.
In order to gain more fans of your Facebook page, you need to think of other ways to promote it. A useful Facebook tool is the ability to create a badge for your page which you can include on your website or in your emails. With the ‘become a fan’ wording on it, it can encourage people to do exactly that – see our example (and please feel free to become a fan!).
Our next blog post will give you some tips on managing Twitter and Facebook pages as well as some information on handy time saving tools to use.
Tags: facebook, Internet Marketing
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