As I was updating Silver Square’s page on Facebook today, it occurred to me that some of the people who follow our blog might appreciate an outline of what we’re doing with our Facebook page. Everyone seems to get that Facebook is a big deal, but it isn’t always clear how to use it for your business.
Your goals should be exposing your business to new eyes and giving your loyal fans interesting updates. Here’s a breakdown of what you can do on each tab of your Facebook page.
Wall
On personal Facebook profiles this area is commonly used to leave status updates. You’ll often read about what someone’s eating for lunch or who’s getting under their skin that day. On a business page, this is an ideal area to make announcements. If you get mentioned on another web site, put a link to it here. Unrolling a new product or service? Shining a spotlight on one of your referral partners? It goes on the wall.
We recently did a mini-promotion where the first 50 people to become our fans on Facebook and sign the wall with the words “give me the twitter guide” would receive a free download of Using Twitter to Boost Your Bottom Line.
Info
Here’s where you can include contact information for your business. There isn’t much detail here, but it’s the type of information that someone discovering you for the first time on Facebook would want to see.
RSS/Blog
We use a Facebook application called Social RSS that lets you add a tab to your Facebook page for your blog. The page loads a little slow, but it automatically keeps this section populated with our latest blog posts. We have it set up to pull posts from our main Silver Square blog as well as our blog where we answer your marketing questions, Get Back on the Road. This allows new visitors to see the content that we are regularly creating (and hopefully decide they want to regularly follow our blogs).
Events
What kind of events should you add to your Facebook page? Open houses, seminars, client appreciation dinners, public relations appearances, and launch parties are all good candidates. One of the advantages of adding the event to Facebook is that it is easy to send a notice about the event to all of your fans. We list all of our free Twitter seminars.
Videos + Photos
Here’s where you get to show a little personality. Include candid photos and videos that you shot on your cell phone. Obviously you wouldn’t want to upload anything that will reflect poorly on your business, but social media sites like Facebook are ultimately about connecting with people. Give your fans a face or two they can put with the company.
You can also include examples of your work. We have several photo galleries of the creative we’ve developed for past clients.
More?
Facebook is designed so that you can customize your page. You can use applications (like Social RSS mentioned above) to add more tabs. If you’re using Facebook and have some favorite applications, sound off in the comments.
