So many companies, retail stores, nonprofits, restaurants and small businesses are making a colossal mistake. They’re creating Facebook profiles for their businesses — not pages.
Here’s the difference: I am a person, so I have a Facebook profile. It looks like this:
This is the Facebook page for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport (client).
It’s not easy to figure this out, since Facebook changes almost daily but what you want for your business or organization is an Official Page, as seen below on the right. NOT a Community Page, which is the choice on the left.
Once you’ve set up your official Facebook Page, here are 10 things you can do with it, to generate “likes” or fans and build your community.
1. Add all events and post them
2. Post photos from events
3. Ask the community questions
4. Introduce topics for discussion
5. Feature key volunteers/members
6. Provide educational material
7. Link to external articles and other content of interest to the organization
8. Pass along special offers to the community when available
9. Celebrate organization “wins”
10. Inform the community about legislation and advocacy action they can take when appropriate.
Great list Marijean.
Few more design elements I’d add:
– consider the size of your Page profile image so that the thumbnail displays full logo (max is 200x600px)
– remove unused or relatively empty tabs
– include url in sidebar info and use “http://” to ensure the link in active
– use FBML app to create a custom landing page that non-fans will see when they first visit your Page
Finally, the Facebook algorithm for serving up content to fans’ personal newsfeeds seems to favor media rich content over text. It’s been suggested that video gets priority over images and images get priority over text.