For most businesses the main focus of their online activity is the company website and the many ways in which this can be used for marketing activity. Other likely online business communications platforms in recent years include blogs. Social networking platforms however have huge numbers of regular users. Their close fit with our need to interact with our friends and family in our personal lives, and the blurring between the boundaries of modern working and personal lives has led to Facebook providing another huge potential opportunity for business online.

Why Set Up a Page? The Stats.

There are so many good reasons – for example there are at least 750 million active Facebook users (@ August 2011) with approximately 50% logging on any day. Each have approximately 130 friends and are likely to sign up to 80 community pages, groups and events. This is a huge networking, brand and reputation-building, and visibility-raising opportunity. Add to this the 2.5 million websites that have now taken the opportunity to integrate with Facebook and the fact that 70% of users are outside the U.S. and you can see that your competitors are already likely to be benefitting from it and using it to communicate with their target customers in the U.K. and overseas.

Other Good Reasons

Another important fact about ‘Pages’ is that they can be indexed by search engines and therefore offer another opportunity to get visitors through natural searches.

The many capabilities and customisation possibilities of the Facebook Page also gives it great power in increasing ‘engagement’ of visitors in your communications, thus making it potentially more effective at getting important marketing messages across.

The Facebook Page / Facebook ‘Fan’ Page.

Facebook allows each individual to have one single ‘Profile’ which should not be used for personal gain in the business sense. Our need to connect and interact with e.g. businesses, brands, products and artists, and their willingness and need to do so with us for their own marketing has led to the recognition of the real need for a Facebook ‘Page’ as well as a personal Facebook ‘Profile’.

Getting Your Facebook Page

After signing up to Facebook to create your own personal ‘Profile’, click on the link (at the foot of the page) called ‘Create a Page’. After doing so you can select what your Page relates to e.g. a local business or place, a brand or product, a company organisation or institution, as an artist or public figure etc. After this initial selection there is likely to be another drop-down selection to further clarify the situation e.g. choosing a page for a brand or product will mean selecting the business category / sector e.g. cars, clothing… You can then set the name for the Page. The final steps involve ticking the ‘agree’ box for the terms and conditions and then clicking on ‘Get Started’. Getting your own business ‘Page’ is therefore quick, easy, and free.

Customising Your New Page

To build your own network of interested parties e.g. existing customers, potential customers, influencers, it’s important to provide content on your Facebook ‘Page’ that encourages people to click on the ‘Like’ button at the top of your Page. You can use a number of elements in your Page to help achieve this, not least of which is the 180 w x 540 h wall image (graphic of your own design and making) which you can upload – this will appear on the left hand side of all areas of your Facebook Page. This image can be used to grab attention, and can be used to include important information such as contact information, URLs and important marketing messages. It is also often used to direct attention to and contain messages that encourage people to simply click on the ‘Like’ button at the top of the page. It is this clicking of the ‘Like’ button that increases your visibility, grows your network and gets your (marketing) messages to a wider audience.

As with websites, the quality of this graphic however could have an impact on how people perceive the quality of your page and organisation, so it’s best to make sure the graphic looks good.

Custom Menus - Links / Tabs

Just as you lay out the pages of your website and label and link the menu in the most appropriate way, you can set up custom links / tabs on the left hand side of your Facebook Page (like a navigation menu). This can achieved using iframes – see http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/462/ or Google iframes for Facebook for details.

Examples of what custom links / tabs can be used for include Bios / or Team – give visitors more information about the members of your organisation (remember that people buy from people), and Photos – show more photos of products or services in action e.g. incorporating Flickr photo sharing. An ‘Events’ link can link to page with not just information about your forthcoming and past events, but could even incorporate a link to buy tickets. A ‘Reveal’ tab can also be a way that on the click of a button a different set of information can be shown, maybe including the discount code for an exclusive offer. This could be a useful way to link to sales promotions.

Custom links / tabs however can be created for almost any aspect which best suits the nature of the Page.

Optimisation and Ranking

This is an important consideration for Facebook Pages since they can be indexed by search engines. Including plenty of key-phrase based text information about your company on your Page is important therefore not just for your page visitors but also to get you Page found in search engines.

Include Rich Content and Other Marketing Tools

You can add video to your Facebook Page as yet another way to build vital engagement. You can also add opt-in sections to help you build lists and gather contact details. These could be ‘baited’ with discounts or the lure of exclusive offers (perhaps even using ‘reveal’ in the process).

Communicate, Interact and Build Your Brand

Facebook allows you to switch between your ‘Profile’ identity (yourself) and your ‘Page’ identity (your business), and you can interact with other Profiles and Pages accordingly (look for the ‘switch’ link).

Inviting comments from your visitors can be a useful way of interacting. When in your ‘Page’ mode (rather than Profile) you can comment on another person’s profile (as long as they allow comments), however you can’t initiate a discussion.

A Proactive Brand Building Approach

When working in ‘Page’ mode you can use the 2 icons (top left) to help find information to help build your network and brand. The person(s) outline icon will show you for example who has recently ‘liked’ your page. This can allow you to look at their pages and potentially make contact. The Globe icon will give you notifications for that page. The switch feature allows you to manage both sides of your Facebook presence in a proactive way.