How to Create Your Fan Page

Facebook pages are different than personal profiles.  Businesses can't have profiles on Facebook, but they can have pages to house all of the pertinent company information they want to display.  The technical details of creating a fan page are not difficult to master and you can easily walk through the steps on Facebook's create a page section.  With this article we are more concerned with a creating the type of page that people will actually become a fan of and not the generic how-to fill out the forms.

Why Even Have a Facebook Page?

This is a question that you should be asking before wasting your time putting something together just to have it.  What are the benefits?  Here is a short list:

1.  Fan pages are open to the public and open to the search engines to index.  This means people can find you without actually having to be your fan.

2.  Facebook allows pages to have a custom URL once there are a certain number of fans.

3.  Pages can have message boards that allow users to interact

4.  There are detailed traffic statistics covering the demographics of the fans of your page.

5.  Facebook allows admins to message all of the fans, update the page's status which will show in each fans' live feed

All of those will help you increase your exposure and/or help you gain trust with potential customers.

Title of Your Fan Page

The first key in creating your fan page is to start with a good title.  Don't make the title generic or a name that people have never heard of.  You want to go for some name recognition, a belief or a cause, or some kind of gimmick that piggybacks off a current event or something in popular culture.  You are targeting a certain niche or demographic with your page so make sure your title shows that.

Quality

You want quality with your fan page.  Don't just create a fan page just to say you have one and then never update it, or just update it with non-stop spam offers.  If you want people to join and stay fans of your page, or better yet, to recommend your fan page to their friends then you have to provide them with quality content.  Sure you can broadcast special offers, but do it occasionally (about once per week) and not all of the time. Funny status updates keep people interested in everything else related to your fan page.  If you deliver value such as solving a problem or offering current events then it is more likely the friends of your current fans will also join.

Admins

Create more than one admin for your page.  This is important if you are going to get aggressive in trying to add people as friends in order to refer them to your page.  If your account has problems, the page could disappear if you are the only admin and you have wasted a lot of time and effort gathering a group that you can't use.

Those are three quick tips in creating a fan page that people will actually join and that you can actually use to make money off of Facebook.

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