Well, I posted an article about Facebook on this blog a few weeks ago, and now we are suddenly doing three Facebook campaigns! The power of social media :)! While I was building my first page, I took some time to try to find useful information on it. Facebook does have a guide on creating pages as well as a blog, but I found little else of use. So - here are some helpful hints and applications that you may want to use while you are building a Facebook page.

1. When building the page, think of what you can do to help your audience. Social media is about having conversations with audience members, not “shouting” at them. It is a dialogue, not a monologue - so think about what your customers would want to dialogue on (sales people or others that face the customer can be a great help on this).

2. There are a lot of useful applications that you can add to your Facebook page:

• Extended Information: This allows you to add any information that you choose, such as phone, e-mail, about, company mission etc. This information is vital, since Facebook only provides the very basic information such as operating hours and nearest subway station as a default
• Poll: There are a few good polling applications, allowing you to poll your users on something relevant to your product or service.
• You Tube Link: If you have YouTube videos available, it can be interesting to display them on your page.
• Bookshare: If you have published books, Bookshare offers an opportunity to display them. The application is meant to be for recommending books, but I have had luck with using it to display books as well.
• The Wall and Discussion Forum: These two standard page features allow you to answer any questions that your users may have and respond to them effectively. Since you are giving expert advice for free, this can be a real benefit to your users.

3. The Facebook page should not live in isolation. For example, you can use the demographics information that Facebook provides to learn more about the users and target your message further. You can announce results from your poll or feature a question/answer from your discussion group on your newsletter. Finally, you can use some of the insights that you got from listening in to some of the feedback mechanism to further develop your product or service.

2 Responses to “Tips on Creating Facebook Business Pages”

1. Roberrific Says:
   June 16th, 2008 at 12:07 pm

   I have found that Facebook is great for reposting content that was created by others, elsewhere… I like to take posts about metal detectors and epic treasure hunts and add to my Dumpdiggers page - the original author is thrilled because it brings him more traffic and I’m happy to get lots of fresh content to thrill readers. Squidoo Lens is better of course, but who goes there nowadays?

2. Stefanie Says:
   June 19th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

   Very interesting - yes, I know many people who find their number one referral is from Facebook, even when they simply post links on their personal page.

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