Facebook Pages
200 million active users worldwide
A 2009 survey ranked Facebook as the most popular networking site with over 200 million active users worldwide. Register for a free account, upload your photograph (but not your portfolio or logo) and complete all necessary information. Then logout, and on the login page, you'll find a link on the bottom right which reads 'to create a page for your business - click here'.
Examples of Facebook Pages we have created
If you become a fan of any of these pages you will see how we promote these companies via Facebook.
Vizcom can create a Facebook page for your business, and suggest it to our network of over 1000 friends for £190 + VAT
Creating Your Page
Creating a Facebook Page is a lot different and more effective than creating a Facebook Group. Groups are often created for fun, with names like 'I Love Cheese' or 'Jeremy Clarkson For Prime Minister' and have limited features. You can upload photos onto a group, but these are displayed singularly in an album of some kind- you can’t sort your photographs and images into different folders. You can upload minimal information and recent news about the issues relating to your event, but that's about it. Groups also have a wall and a discussion function, both of which are displayed on the front page.
Making a Facebook Page for your business makes a lot more sense as a Page has more functions and looks more professional than a group, and other people with Pages are either companies like your own or celebrities - so there's less chance of you being listed next to a group with a silly name and concept in a search. Making your page work for you
So you’ve built a Facebook Page for your business, but what are you going to do with it now? Because Facebook is the most popular social networking site, this is not a place where you can create a profile and leave it to attract potential customers from it’s presence alone, so get a pencil and take note! We’ll be giving extra marks to those who not only heed our advice but come and find us on Facebook too- we’d be pleased to provide a link back to your page.
Status updating
Firstly, if you’re already au faux with Facebook and have a personal account, you’ll understand how status updates work. If not, in a nutshell, like Twitter, MySpace, and the majority of other social networking sites, you can update your status by filling in the relevant box at the top of your Facebook Page. Ideally, you should update this as often as possible, so that your profile stays in as many people’s newsfeeds as possible.
To the newbies, when people log onto Facebook, they can see a newsfeed which is a list of all of the recent activities and status updates from their Facebook Friends. If you only update your status once a day, say at 8am in the morning, it will only appear to the friends that check their newsfeeds at around that time, but if you update as often as possible throughout the day, you will appear in more newsfeeds and thus gain more coverage.
Also, bear in mind that a status update doesn’t just have to be as simple and mundane as ‘Dan is making a cup of tea’, you can post links to other pages too, and don’t forget the ‘@’ function. This is a relatively new feature for statuses where you can tag friends within your update and it’s all very similar. In fact, if you’re already a compulsive Twitterer, then you’ll know exactly what I mean!
Instead of writing ‘Dan received his order from Diet Girl today, he is very happy with his purchase!’ you would type ‘Dan received his order from’ and then add the ‘@’ character and you’ll be presented with a small scrolling list of all of your friends. You would then choose Diet Girl, and my name would then show on the status as blue text. Then you would finish the rest of the sentence and since it’s all about an order being delivered, you could take a photo of whatever you’ve bought and attach that to your status too. Photographs usually attract fellow Facebook users and you will find that lots of people find the spare time to surf about the recent photos uploaded by their friends.
You may find in time that you may attract frequent visitors to your page that get involved with what you’re talking about that day. You can use the ‘@’ to include them in online discussions, and thank them for their custom and involvement.
There is an add-on available on Facebook which when applied, automatically updates your Twitter status whenever you update your Facebook Page status- thus saving you valuable time and ensuring that both profiles appear reasonably active.
Other features
Your Facebook Page has a Wall facility up the length of the front page, with tabs at the top which take you to a separate Discussions page and a page for customers to review your services. There's also a Boxes tab, where you can display any applications you may have subscribed to. The Wall is used for customers and ‘fans’ of your Page to leave you messages and ask questions, as opposed to the Discussions area for having more in-depth conversations.
Videos
The status bar is also brilliant for highlighting whatever else you’ve got to offer on your page as well. If you have recently built your page, then you will be aware of the tabs which run across the top of the profile. You can make good use of these, with a little thought. For instance, the Videos tab is often empty on many Facebook Pages, simply because not many businesses have videos of their own to showcase- but the videos don’t have to be yours!
You can find plenty of videos relevant to your business on YouTube and other such sites and that said, the videos you choose to display don’t always have to be relevant to your business. Internet memes like the sneezing panda are funny, child safe, and give viewers to your page a reason to return, as chances are, if the video is funny, they’ll want to show their friends and colleagues.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that since the majority of mobile phones have a video camera function these days, you could actually shoot some of your own amateur footage and upload that. Done properly, this helps make your business more personable, as potential customers often like to see ‘what it’s like behind the scenes’ and it makes your employees and team all the more personable.
Photographs
Another tab is the photos tab, which is often sadly neglected too. Again, most mobile phones are fitted with still cameras too, so there’s no excuses here! Take photos of yourself, your team, and any events that you have attended that are relevant to the business. Take pictures of the exterior of your premises on a sunny day, and pictures of your team working together. The more personable you can make your business, the more potential customers you can attract, especially in regard to Facebook.
Again, you can include funny photos found on the internet on occasion, just ensure that they’re family friendly for obvious reasons. You can upload photos and order them into individual albums, which is brilliant if you have both a portfolio of your completed work and photos of you receiving awards and at networking events and that kind of thing - this makes your images easier to sort through by potential customers. The more often you update your photos, the more your page will appear in the photo feed that all of the fans of your page can surf through.
Facebook Notes
Facebook Notes is an application available to both personal profiles and pages that allows you to write longer sections of text than you would in a status update. This is useful for advertising new products and services that you may be offering that can’t be mentioned using any of the other functions of your Page, such as Photos, Videos and Links.
You can also link your Notes add-on to update whenever you post a blog entry, which is extremely useful if you have taken our previous advice and written a weblog about your business. Again, this saves you valuable time and is one less profile to update whilst still keeping your Page active in newsfeeds. At Vizcom, we've subscribed to the Notes application and linked it with our Blog Of The Dog on Wordpress, meaning that for every journal entry we publish, it is automatically duplicated on our Facebook Page, allowing people who might not have a Wordpress Blog to comment.
Events and Links
As well as the tabs across the top of your Page, there’s also several boxes down the right hand side of the profile that are just waiting to be updated! The events box is very usual for social events on a personal profile, but in regards to a Facebook Page for a business, you can be all the more creative.
Use the Events to advertise the launch of new products and services, social events, and exciting happenings that are going on within your business. Given, your online customers might not want to be invited to your birthday party, but they might really want to know that you’re now offering money off a specific product. When making an event, always try to complete as much of the form as possible and always try to include photographs, but don’t worry if you make a mistake, you can always go back and edit it out.
The Links box is where you provide a link to another website with a little bit of text explaining what the website is about, and this is an excellent feature to take advantage of. You can link to your latest blog posts, new pages and products on your main company website and links to blogs, websites, news stories and even competitors businesses too. You can on occasion post some funny stuff too, as visitors to the Page can comment on your links, it’s a good way to get them involved. Again, this all helps your page stay active and often potential customers will click a link that has been recommended by a friend.
Tell your friends
Finally, on a Facebook Page, anyone who views it will have the option to 'become a fan', instead of being a 'member'. As most people have Facebook accounts for personal use, it's a great place to promote your business for free, exhibiting your portfolio and advertising your events. When you begin your Page, after you have uploaded all of the information you possibly can, why not ask all of your personal friends and family members to join to get the ball rolling? The chances are that they won't have an idea of all the things that your business offers, and this is a good way to show them and perhaps get them to recommend you to others.
And finally
The main thing to remember with Facebook is that it’s a social networking tool that is live 24/7 365, if you are creating an online presence for your business, you must keep it updated regularly for you to gain the best possible benefits. Having a Facebook Page works well because it can be accessed by anyone with a computer or internet compatible mobile phone, and as the majority of people possess at the very least a personal profile, you will be able to keep your business in the forefront of people’s minds on the biggest social networking site worldwide.