Creating a unique and innovative Facebook fan page

Facebook just reached over 300 million users, so this means that they are almost the size of the United States. I created a Facebook fan page for my blog as soon as I started it, and I think that every business, web and non-web must have a Facebook fan page. As soon as I got started with my Fan page I literally had no traffic from it, but now when I have more than a hundred fans, I get up to 10 to 15 visitors everytime I post something.

Creating a fan page is hell easy, but recently I came across many pages on Facebook which were very unique and innovative, these pages were very engaging and I’m sure it drove a lot of exposure to its owners. I guess most of those pages were outsourced to some professional, but this is possible without any technical expertise.

Your Business profile

This is something everyone else has so this doesn’t come under unique or innovative, but your business profile is something that has the maximum effect on Facebook users. A fan page should contain honest information about you and your company and make sure that its constantly updated.

Overview of your company
About products and services
Top employees
Website and contact information
Videos and photos
News and latest happenings
New customers

These are the things required in your Fan page, you can easy update this and doesn’t take much time and you don’t have to have any sort of technical expertise. It is advisable to use a bit of humor when it comes to videos and photos, just to make your users more engaging.

Set up a landing page

Most of the pages on Facebook take their first time visitors to their wall, which I feel is a terrible idea. A wall is good for interacting with your fans and answering questions and stuff, so a new visitor must be taken to a welcome page where there is a brief description about your company and your services, with a nice looking picture and if possible a video. You can also show off your latest offers and contests on your welcome page.

Creating a welcome page isn’t very difficult and can be created within minutes, that is excluding the content you put there. You can use the simple FBML app for this purpose, through which you’ll be adding HTML content to Facebook. After you finish adding the content, name the page as ‘welcome’ or whatever you wish to name it.

After this its time to make your newly made tab as a default page, for this goto the options menu and under that visit settings section and here change the default landing tab to your newly made tab.

Contests and Giveaways

One thing common in most social media users is that they love contests, giveaways and freebies. This can be a wonderful way for you to drive attention towards your fan page. I’ve seen many fan pages which give away coupons to their fans in the form of monthly updates , so you see now people have a reason to be your fan.

Its necessary that you make banners and post it on your welcome page and send an update as soon as the contest starts. The giveaways must be given at the end of the particular season or else it will spread out on Facebook and may cause you to loose your potential fans.

After you’ve got your contest ready, now its time to promote your contest to your users. I would say write a post on your blog and post a banner linking to your contest, make a video and post it everywhere including your fan page, post banners and videos on your welcome page and then promote on other groups and pages related to your niche.

Start putting up polls

Social media is all about asking user opinions and increasing user engagement, right? Facebook provides you with tons of options to provide your fans with polls, one of the best is the poll app. A poll can be a casual question asking users about your product or something thats a bit fun or entertaining such as (How many of you outsource blogging?).

Most successful brands start new polls each week about their products or services, this increases user interaction and actually promotes your products.

Integrate with other networks

Most successful social media campaigns includes your presence in major social networks and your presence will be more influential and effective if all are integrated with one another. Facebook allows you to integrate your fan page with your accounts in major social networks, I’d recommend that you mainly integrate with Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare.

All of your pics in Flickr, your tweets in Twitter and your location on Foursquare will be available to your fans, so now with just tweets, pics and status updates you’ll be able to influence a hell lot of your Facebook fans.

You can use an application known as the Twitter tab, which integrates your tweets into a separate tab known as Twitter updates and the Flickr tab which brings all of your pics into a new tab, I personally use the Flickr app on my personal profile. The same is for foursquare, I don’t know much about it, because I don’t use it.

Write about you and your team

One small mistake I see in many corporate fan pages is that they never write about their top employees and the owners, and this is something that users really value. Give brief introduction about your top employees and the people behind the curtain. This gives a personal touch and makes the users feel that the person behind this is actually a human.

If you have too many employees, give a brief description about a department or a team and some info about its leader. Make sure that the particular department or the leader of a team can be easily contacted.

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Comments

Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach says:

April 2, 2010 at 2:25 pm

Gotta love Facebook fan pages, I even built one specifically for my Aprils Fools Day post.
.-= Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach´s last blog ..A Secret Expert Glimpse Into PROFITABLE April Fools Day Postings (ie, how to write one) =-.

Saul Farber, Keynote Speaker Agent says:

April 2, 2010 at 6:15 pm

Thank you for the post!!
Just set up my Fan Page today to integrate w/my Drupal blog. Looking forward to piecing everything together.
.-= Saul Farber, Keynote Speaker Agent´s last blog ..Steve Roesler – Halos and Horns =-.

Real Blogging Advice says:

April 4, 2010 at 9:10 am

I built my first facebook fan page yesterday and it really awes me about its features.

It is really very useful for promoting our blogs.

Thanks for the information my friend.
.-= Real Blogging Advice´s last blog ..Google Adsense Abuse Issue: Account Termination =-.

pharmacy technician says:

April 20, 2010 at 4:05 am

My cousin recommended this blog and she was totally right keep up the fantastic work!

verourerrense says:

April 28, 2010 at 6:59 am

It’s really well done! Respect to author.

Make A Fan Page says:

January 22, 2011 at 7:48 pm

Awesome information, fan pages are so under used.

Genie Ockerman says:

July 12, 2011 at 8:21 am

Great Post!