Promoting Your Facebook Fan Page

A Facebook fan page is an excellent way to promote your business on the fastest growing social networking site. Facebook fan pages are for every type of business imaginable, not just for singers and stars.

Creating a Facebook fan page is easy and takes just a few minutes. If you don’t have a Facebook fan page, go here.

Let’s look at some of the things you can post on your fan page:

- Overview of company
- Website and contact info
- Press releases
- Videos
- Blog RSS
- Twitter updates
- Company news and status
- Customer interaction

1. Recommend your fan page to your friends

Your friends are your first step in promoting your fan page. Not only will this give you a solid base of fans but will also help spread the word about your fan page. Be sure that your page is configured correctly and you have added a good amount of content like photos and links before suggesting your page to friends.

This can be a tedious task when you have a large number of friends (+500)  but expect a solid return. In recent “suggest” tests, I’ve converted 30-45% of my friends into fans of particular pages I am promoting. Of course depending on how interesting or popular your nice/business is the numbers will vary.

Here is where you will find the link to suggest your fan page to your friends

When one of your friends becomes a fan of your page 2 events occur

1. its published in your friends “live feed”

2. your friends profile is updated.

How does this help me? If your new fan has a decent number of friends (200-300+) , and a large amount of them are active, those users will see the activity in the live news feed. I imagine conversion on these actions are about 1-2% of the total suggest test.

2. Promote your fan page on your website or blog.

Blog

If you are a blogger or run a website that is updated frequently you should consider placing a Facebook widget inside or around your content. Promoting your page this way helps grow your core audience on Facebook and will be the major force of your fan page interaction. In recent months, Facebook has made many improvements into promoting profiles, pages and groups.

Here is an example over at Zeropaid.com where I place a widget at the end of the content below “recommended posts” and above my comments.

Facebook Widgets here: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

Facebook Fan Box: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbox.php

Website – Business | eCommerce | Corporate

Many websites struggle with how to push social networks inside of content, sometimes they don’t even bother because of old school internet ideology. Some even fear these marketing tactics can bring unwanted brand tarnishing in an uncontrollable internet wild west. I am hear to say PROMOTE, PROMOTE, PROMOTE your Facebook fan page!

Somewhere on your website you need to declare your fan page and push your loyal visitors to it. A great place to start is your “About Us” or “Contact Us” page. I would suggest using a “fan box” but without your “stream” included. This is a great place to quietly announce your fan page and gain some fans.

Facebook Fan Box: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbox.php

3. Posting to your fan page

Posting relevant links, photos and events on a consistent basis is vital to your page’s viral growth.

For those of you looking to tie your business and Facebook more together, consider a contest and utilize Facebook as the voting booth.

Let me make one thing clear, when you write on your page’s wall the information will be posted for all your fans to see. So if you think posting 5 times a day on your wall is a good idea think again, you will only loose fans… Focus on consistent posts about relevant topics and never go off topic.

In some cases, fan pages don’t even need posting, the fans do all the work by discussing among themselves. Example: Minnesota Vikings fan page http://www.facebook.com/minnesotavikings

I hope article gives you some ideas on how you can promote your Facebook fan page. If you want to share some of your ideas, please post them in a comment.