While a personal Facebook page allows you to keep people on your friends list informed about what is going on in your life, Facebook groups unite people from around the globe who share common interests, and Facebook business pages help you market specific products through creative and communicative advertising.
The bottom line is that if you can manage to set up a personal Facebook page, you can also set up a Facebook group, business, product or fan page to represent your online enterprise. As far as the process of setting up such a page is concerned, there is no additional knowledge required.
How To Create A Facebook Business Fan Page
1) You need to first have a personal Facebook account – http://www.facebook.com
2) Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php – this will take you to the Create New Facebook Page.
3) Once there, select the category of your page, ‘Area’, ‘Brand, Product or Organization’ or ‘Artist, Band or Public Figure’. For a business page you would generally select option 2.
4) Add the name of your business page
5) Select if it is publically visible or not
Facebook periodically checks for duplicate accounts (and IP addresses) so it is important you create just one personal account—as you run the risk of having all accounts deleted as stated in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
When signed in on your personal page, you will also have access to your business page(s) as an administrator/creator.
Whilst creating your business page you will be asked to check a box saying you are the authorized representative of the organisation. This is to prevent so called brand squatters, who set up unofficial pages to either promote goods under another company’s name, or simply to build contact lists.
For a business page, you will be asked to select the type of product you are promoting, name the professional service attached to the product, and confirm your submission by responding to a captcha, via text or audio.
To add, there is an option to modify security and account settings and select networks, which you can change a maximum of twice in any sixty day period. If you have the appropriate scholastic or vocational email, you may subscribe to additional networks.
How To Create A Facebook Group
1) Goto your Facebook Profile Page
2) Select The Info Tab
3) Scroll down to Groups at the bottom of the page
4) Select See All
5) Create New Group – top left hand side of the page
From there, create a group name, pick a category and subcategory, and write a brief description (required). Once the group is created, you can invite friends, appoint officers and administrators, and much like a fan or business page, message the group as a whole.
So having set up a group or business page, what can you do with it that will benefit your online enterprise?
Engage your visitor
The first step in this process is to decide where they should land when they click through to your Facebook business or group page.
According to Facebook blogger Nick O’Neil, the last place you want visitors to arrive at is ‘The Wall’. The problem he says, is that Facebook’s Wall feature gives too much freedom for users to write whatever they want. This may yield some gems, but you’ll miss the opportunity to engage users in specific conversations, giving you valuable data to grow your business.
Using one or more of the 55,000 Facebook applications available (which can be found on the Edit Page link on your business page) offers you infinite opportunities to engage your visitors with everything from online events, games, quizzes, surveys and many other types of interactive content. Some applications can be designed to solicit the kind of interaction and information you need to grow your business, such as customer feedback on new or existing products or services.
Calls to Action
Where possible you should make sure that the links you have placed elsewhere to drive traffic to your Facebook Group or Business Page, include a clear call to action related to the application you are using.
Commit to engage with your visitor on a one to one basis
As I have said in some of my previous blogs, the Internet is not a one way street, and invariably users expect to engage in a dialogue, so when someone does leave a comment on your latest Facebook update, you need to reply. Moreover, reply sincerely. When you are genuinely interested and curious about what people have said, you are more likely to yield even more valuable information which may deepen your understanding about your customer’s motivations even further.
This only begins to scratch the surface of what’s possible with business and group pages, which I will write more about in future posts.
If you have found this article on setting up a Facebook business page or group useful, please share it by using the icons below. If you need any more information or have any comments, I would love to hear from you. Thank you very much.
hi Harvey, I came across your blog there about the facebook business page..thanks for that info!!! Much appreciated.
Very interesting post Harvey. Thanx.
Keep it up!!
Thnaks for sharing, hope my property will sell even better now!
Hi Chris,
No problem at all, I hope you found the information useful. Please let me know if you need any further help.
Regards
Harvey
I really want to separate my personal account totally from my business account. Each involves a totally separate group of people (friends who want to know about your family and goings-on – and business who want specific, useful, relevant, on-topic information and are not interested in what my offspring had for breakfast). I don’t want to mix the two as they are very different, and the business has thousands of subscribers so that it would proabably swamp the private account. How can one do this?
Hi Terry,
Your personal Facebook wall and your business’s Facebook page are totally independent. i.e. What you enter on your personal wall does not necessarily display on your business page unless you want it to.
So information regarding your personal life or family is only displayed to your Facebook friends not to the people that like your Facebook Page.
Facebook only allows you to have one account, so your business page should be set up using your personal account, but the content displayed on both can be totally unrelated.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Harvey
Hi Harvey
I am trying to set up a page for my new product. I have seen that a page does not allow you to contact people but a group does have the email option etc.. so maybe this is the best option for us but i can not seem to be able to put some artwork on the wall page of the group page and this is the first thing i want people to see. Can you help at all?
Many thanks
Nicola
Hi Nicola,
If you set up a Facebook page and you have people Join (become Fans) you can 100% email them regular updates. This is all done via your Facebook account.
To modify the look and feel of Facebook, they have developed their own language similar to HTML, it is known as FBML (Facebook Markup Language). I can’t really go into the full details of it here, as there is alot of information. However, if you have a search in Facebook or Google, then you will find a great deal of useful articles.
I hope this helps.
Regards
Harvey