8 Easy Steps to Create Your Corporate Facebook Page

by Zach Browne on August 18, 2010

Facebook PageYour Facebook Page is your brand’s official social network community. It should represent what your company is, who you are serving, why they should care, and where they can go to learn more or take further action. When people become fans of your Facebook Page, their friends are notified via News Feeds. If they click on the story, they are taken to your Facebook Page. Pages are also often used as the landing page for social ads.

Here are eight simple steps for getting started:

1. Register for a Facebook account. To create a Page or buy ads, you have to sign up for a Facebook business account.

2. Create a new Page.

Most products and services fall under the “Brand or Product” category. If you are a smaller business focused on a specific location, you can select the “Local” option, which Facebook has defined mostly for service oriented businesses who cater to a particular city. The last option is for artists, bands, and other public figures, such as politicians and celebrities. Once you have come up with a strategy and your set of content, actually creating a new Facebook Page is fairly straightforward. Just specify the name and type, and Facebook will generate a page template with blank sections for a company picture, description, wall, photo, video, and notes.

3. Upload a picture, provide basic information, and customize the look and feel.

Use a large, high-resolution logo for your picture. Grainy pictures look unprofessional. Next, provide basic information about your company, such as when it was founded, a link to your website, company overview, mission, and list of products. To make it more entertaining and stand out, it’s not a bad idea to also include interesting facts such as celebrity customers, funny quotes, and brand trivia. Last, but not least, you can use Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to customize the Page’s look and feel using HTML and Flash. You might want to make this consistent with your brand look and feel elsewhere. Some companies choose to purposely create a completely different look and feel to bring fresh perspective to the brand.

4. Add engaging content, platform apps, and opportunities for interaction.

Before you make the Page public, seed it with interactive content and apps, such as polls, petitions, games, contests, slideshows, and surveys, to inspire engagement. Platform applications can be added to Facebook Pages just like they are added to a person’s profile. In addition, you should write a “welcome” message on the wall, post relevant links, seed discussion board topics by posing open-ended questions like “what are your thoughts on X?”, upload photos, and add your blog’s RSS feed to the Note tab. When you are ready, publish the Page so that it becomes public, shows up in search results, and becomes viewable by others.

5. Recruit early fans.

Make sure to become a fan of your own Page, and ask your employees, friends, and acquaintances to do the same. It’s important to seed the Page with a critical mass of fans before going out to the public and recruiting new people. You want people being exposed to your brand orPage for the first time to feel like it’s dynamic and in high demand.

6. Promote your Page to get more fans.

You can help promote your page using Facebook Ads. Another popular technique is to include a link to your page in your e-mail signatures, website, blogs, and other customer or prospect touch points so they know where to find you on Facebook.

7. Moderate the community by periodically updating content and responding toposts.

At least once a week, refresh content with new surveys, contests,videos, photos, articles, and announcements. Hopefully, you will have developed these for other channels such as your website. You can reuse them here. Less frequently, you might want to check out new platform apps to add and switch out old ones. Respond where appropriate to user-generated content, such as wall posts and forum messages, especially if someone asks aquestion that has not received a response. Dynamic content is best at keeping users engaged, so select content that is timely, recent, and preferably multimedia. People will keep coming back to your Page only if you give them reasons todo so. If your Page is stale, you will lose people’s attention and potentially even hurt your brand. Set the right expectations for your community according to the high-level strategy you developed, and then make sure you follow through on the commitment.

8. Consider different Pages for different audiences.

Just like you might create multiple landing pages in traditional online marketing to tailor your message tospecific audiences, you might consider creating multiple Facebook Pages. There are trade-offs to maintaining more than one Page, so it might not make sense in every case. If you do decide to support multiple Pages, keep in mind you can reuse elements across Pages, such as streaming blog updates,video, and apps.

I really hope this helps you get started on launching you first corporate Facebook Page.  If you need any help, be sure to contact me.

Related Blogs

No related posts.

Sorry, no related posts found.

Leave a Comment

Previous post:

Next post: