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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Facebook Fan Page: Essential Tips, Apps And Examples


Better Facebook Fan Page: Essential Tips, Apps And Examples

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Facebook has changed all of our lives. Whether you’ve ever had an account or even visited the website, it’s difficult to ignore the hundreds of Facebook’s “Like” and “Share” badges seen all around the modern web. The blogosphere is constantly buzzing with comments and shares over Facebook.




Knowing the popularity of Facebook, it’s commonplace to create a fan page for any community or website launch. This provides an outlet for your fans to get together in one place to share ideas, photos, questions, and reviews. This type of marketing works in any corporate or personal situation, thus it’s perfect for businesses and events.

In this particular post, I’ll be going into a few useful tips to put together an amazing fan page. This will help your website, community, or product sales garner a lot of attention! After all, Facebook is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the Internet. Why wouldn’t you want your brand spread all over there?

Benefits Of A Fan Page

Before we go into creating a Facebook fan page, first we should explain what exactly a fan page comprises. Unknown to many is the fact that each fan page will be presented in public. While user profiles are generally hidden from search engine crawlers, fan page can be created and open to everybody. This is by default their natural state.




Users are able to see your photos, updates, and latest notes published even without a Facebook account. With some newer features you can even import a RSS feed from your blog or Twitter account. Once you’ve created a fan page, you can set up discussion forums too. This is a great place for people to meet and share opinions about whatever your topic may be.

And the most obvious benefit? It’s 100% free of charge! Doesn’t cost a dime. This type of marketing only costs a little time to setup and configure, thus making it possible for you to invest more time and cost on marketing.

With fan page, you’re also able to upload photos and video content and store these contents remotely on Facebook’s server while sharing out directly to your fans. The promotional value is huge from any standpoint.


Creating A Fan Page
For the sake of this article we’re assuming you’ve already signed up Facebook and have an account yourself. If not, feel free to create one, or sign up under your company name with a fake personality.




If you are logged into the site, scroll towards the very bottom of the page. On the right-hand side of the footer you’ll find a series of small links, one of which is titled Create a Page. Click and you’re brought right here to choose the type of page you’re looking to create. Facebook styles the pages differently based on your focus. Some examples include an event or charity, entertainment media, celebrities or bands, and local businesses.

You’ll have to fill in a bit of information and agree to Facebook Pages’ terms and conditions. It’s all fairly straightforward information, so you shouldn’t get lost anywhere in the process. However if you run into an obstacle, you can try to go back to the front page and start again.

If you’ve confirmed your details and everything looks good, congratulations! You’ve completed the creation process and your new fan page is up online. You can now edit settings, upload photos, and invite your friends to join.

Customizing Basic Points

There are some rudimentary steps you’ll want to customize before anything else. After your fan page is online you’ll certainly want to change your default photo. Often a company or brand logo works best. This is recognized quickly by potential fans and will be displayed across the network on their profile pages.




You’ll find an “Info” tab located on the front of your profile. This should contain information about your cause or event, video game, whatever you’ve chosen to market. Try generating unique web copy for your Facebook page as this tends to be very important to Google and other search engines. Even if you change up some sentences, this will go a long way in unique branding for your fan page.

You may additionally wish to create albums and upload more public photos. These could be photographs of your team, or photographs of your work space. They could even be screenshots from your movie or favourite video game title. Either way it’s great to include some extra photos as it’ll add some legitimacy to your page. Viewers also love the extra content and it’ll rope in some potentially wary group members.

Consider welcoming your visitors and explaining a bit about why you created the page. Or if you would rather stay out of 1st person, pretend you are not someone creating the page and write from an external source. Explain a bit about your fan page and why people should join. What information will they access? Can you offer any unique video or image not found anywhere else?


Adding In-Page Apps


It’s very unfortunate that Facebook’s app directory has gone, but a better application searching solution is in the development. That’s not really a problem for you, as we will showcase some best Facebook apps here! If you find anything interesting it’s a simple process to include this new app onto your page in just a few minutes.




You can access the apps right from your fan page when you’re logged in. It’s worth to note that the content these apps bring will also be open to all visitors, as no information is hidden from a public fan page.

Truly the addition of apps was a brilliant strategy Facebook created. It allows extensible features to be added into any page, at any time, automatically! And these are turned off by default to keep things clean and organized. It’s only you as the administrator who can place additional content onto the page.



Personally I’d also recommend the Extended Info app (included below as well). With this you can add another portion to your profile such as favourite food, TV show, life interests, etc. You can edit these to fit specific goals or recommendations. As an example a video game website may write about their favourite reviews or latest launches from 2011. If you own a blog you may also share your most popular articles or categories.

The process of creating a Facebook application is a bit convoluted, especially for those not grounded in the basics of programming languages and syntax. But for any tech-savvy individuals you may consider creating a few apps for your personal fan page. The Facebook developer center offers comprehensive documentation and examples. Check out their Getting Started guide for more resources.

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