10 Ways to Maximize Your Facebook Page
Facebook marketing can be ridiculous. I often joke that you almost need a Masters of Facebook degree now to keep up with their growth and fully understand all the implications of the site’s features. Sometimes how frequently and aggressively they roll out changes can make it hard for users to keep up. The GOOD side of this, though, is that Facebook can be incredibly responsive in meeting the changing needs of their user base, such as marketers seeking to maximize their time on the site.
The evolution of Facebook’s marketing began in 2007 with the release of their ad network, fan pages and analytics tools and they have since been working in new features that allow more ways for brands to interact with their customer base. Their fan pages feature allows businesses to separate their identity from those of personal pages that an individual would set up. This entry will address some of the cool features that make fan pages great for businesses!
Here are 10 things to do with your Facebook Fan Page that you may not have known about:
Initial setup
- Claim your location
- If you have a brick-and-mortar shop or building, you can claim it on Facebook Places to allow people to check in when they visit you. When visitors “check in” to a place it shows up on those visitors’ personal pages which is a great way to allow your guests to do some marketing for you while they just have fun sharing their activities! Once you have your address entered on your Fan Page, give Facebook a couple of days to reconcile your location with their map feature, then it should automatically give you the option to claim it.
- Claim your username
- It takes 25 fans to claim custom URL which will look like http://facebook.com/mybusinessname. Once you reach 25 fans, go to http://facebook.com/username to claim yours!
Interaction tips
- Post updates with media attached
- Updates with links, pictures or videos increase the likelihood that your status will be seen by fans. Facebook uses an algorithm kind of like a search engine to determine what content gets shown in people’s newsfeeds and posts including media are far more likely to appear.
- Use @ tagging to connect to other businesses and people
- Typing the “@” symbol before a business or person’s name allows you to make a status update with an alert attached. If you tag “@John Doe,” John will get a notification that he has been tagged–and if his privacy settings allow for it, your post will also appear on his wall, too! You must be friends with the person or a fan of a business to tag them.
Behind the scenes
- “Use Facebook as page”
- This is a cool feature that allows you to use your fan page to travel around and comment on both personal and fan pages as your company instead of as you the individual. This is a great way to be proactive with building your own community.
- “Promote with an ad”
- I can’t stress enough the value of Facebook’s amazingly targeted advertising network. You can customize those you would like to target down to age, gender, location, interests, and more! It is the most powerful online advertising network to date and I can testify to seeing some amazing results from working with Facebook ads.
- “View Insights”
- This is another very important tool for your marketing. Facebook’s analytics is getting more robust all the time. It now allows you to see all kinds of statistics about your page from visitors’ ages and genders to their interaction with each of your posts and this sort of data can tell you what you are doing well and what you could work on improving.
All those other links
- “Suggest to friends” on the top right side allows you to send private messages to individuals you are friends with and suggest that they like your page
- “Likes” section on the left side of your fan page allows you to promote the businesses of others in your network. When you are visiting the pages of other businesses you like, look beneath the same section. There is a link that says “Add to my page’s favorites” which allows you to display their page on yours.
- “Share” on the left bottom side of your page allows you to post a public status update to your personal page about your fan page
More resources:
To go back a few steps to Facebook marketing 101, check out:
http://mashable.com/2011/05/25/facebook-marketing-guide/
OR to get more advanced with some of these tools and ideas, check out:
http://www.allfacebook.com/7-biggest-fan-page-marketing-mistakes-2011-05
So there you have it! Was any of this new to you? Is there anything you think you can apply to your Facebook marketing today?
Authored by Jenn Cloud
Jenn is a webgeek, wordsmith and wunderkind that is responsible for putting out some fires and starting others for the Kirkwood-based marketing agency bigwidesky. She has worked with many great local and national brands such as Ridemakerz, Yelp.com, author Ridley Pearson, Latitude 26 Tex Mex, California Custom Decks, Body Worlds 3, Dance St. Louis and more with the incredible teams that helped them find their voices. In mid 2010 Jenn had the honor of being one of the leaders that started St. Louis’ first Coworking environment, aptly named Saint Louis Coworking. She’s pretty good at having a lot of fun and now she aims to take over the world using bad pop culture references and causing a ruckus in most social situations.
