Importance of Facebook Fan Pages
- 12 Comment
Myspace reminds me of high school drama and spam, it’s just what I associate it with. When I was told about Facebook I thought it was just another network, and I passed on it. Wasn’t it just for college students anyways? Well at first it was (right?), but it has emerged into a dominant social network.
How To Utilize Facebook
Shortly after I joined Facebook I saw the potential to promote my websites, affiliates, and any other type of sponsorships. It can all be nicely done with Facebook Fan Pages.
Facebook Fan Pages can be very beneficial to any website or company. You can really become a fan of anything, whether it’s for someone famous like George Lopez or an interest like free samples.
Every time a Fan Page is updated, the updates go out to everyone who is a fan (unless they have it hidden from their news feed). Whenever I update my fan pages, all of my fans see what’s new and can comment, engage in conversations, ask questions, and visit my website all at one central place.
As of right now Michael Jackson and Barack Obama have the most fans/supporters on Facebook. How great is that?
So what’s the best way of setting up a fan page?
In my eyes their are three different types of fan pages. One for businesses, one for websites, and one for products. A business is going to have a different type of fan page. They are going to be for the entire company, not just a particular product they sell. The most popular one is Starbucks.
For most of us, we would want to do one for our website, or the product or “theme” it’s about. However I would recommend targeting more to the niche rather than your website brand (unless it already has a huge following).
Blogging SEO 101 tells us to target the popular terms of your niche. Ranking well in search engines can be difficult and time consuming. Yet on Facebook the same rules don’t apply.
Targetting Your Niche on Facebook
When making my fan pages, I generally make the page about the topic instead of the website name. Once you make the page, you cannot change the name, so it’s forever.
For example, I’ve made fan pages for Free Samples, Coupons and Poetry. Most of the updates all link to my websites, but in order for people to find the page in the first place, they would search these terms. On Facebook I rank #1 for Free Samples, #3 for Coupons, and my Poetry page should be moving up soon.
I’ve thought about making a page for Blog About Your Blog, but I wouldn’t call it that. Most likely it would be “Blogging” since it’s becoming a popular word and I could rank well for that.
Promoting Your Fan Page
My fan pages have been the easiest to grow for my websites. One click and you can gain a fan. In about 3 months, I was able to get 2,000 fans for my freebie site with 0 (ZERO) paid advertising. Once you gain your initial fans, they grow pretty organically.
There are some easy ways to promote your page. Of course add the widget on your sidebar. You can include the name, thumbnail image, number of fans, and the newest update. To get your widget go to “edit page” and under your Admins you should find “get your badge”. There you can customize what you want the widget to display.
After doing that, I would definitely recommend “suggesting” your fan page to your friends list. Simply go to your fan page, on the left side select “more” then “suggest to friends”. I usually like to do this once a month, so I can send the suggestions to people who haven’t joined yet and send it to new friends I added.
Does your website/business have a Facebook fan page yet?
Related Posts
12 Comments on this post
Trackbacks
-
Minnesota Attorney said:
Facebook fan pages is starting to seem like the new squidoo.com or mahalo.com in the way they are allowing sites on all sorts of topics.
September 30th, 2009 at 11:54 pm -
Minnesota Attorney said:
This is a great article. I just tweeted it at http://twitter.com/AttorneyMN
October 1st, 2009 at 8:55 am -
used tires said:
Ohh that’s very cool of you to twitter about it Aaron =D
And yes, facebook was at first a social network for just college students, I joined it in 2006 when it was just for us college students. Then they started allowing high school students and slowly opened it up to the public. You had to have a .edu email address extension at the time when it was just for college students, and that was how they verified that you were indeed a college student.
Till then,
Jean
October 1st, 2009 at 11:10 am -
Matthew Henrickson said:
Definitely appreciate the tweet! 🙂
Yes fan pages do seem like the new squidoo great comparison. I’ve never had much success with squidoo though.
have either of you done a fan page?
October 1st, 2009 at 11:14 am -
Austin Dreier said:
Nice post, i have a facebook but i never thought I could use it like a promotional tool! Thanks for giving me a great idea for promoting CenterHealth And Wpromote
October 1st, 2009 at 7:33 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
I noticed I didn’t even put the traffic I’m getting from it, I’ll do a follow-up on Monday 🙂
October 2nd, 2009 at 8:44 am -
trisha said:
matt, when you say “fan page” do you mean like networking your blog? I am not down w/ the facebook lingo.
October 5th, 2009 at 2:12 pm -
Matthew Henrickson said:
Networking your blog is different and I’m not very famaliar with.
A fan page is different. If you click on one of mine you will see it’s different from the network blogs. You can “become a fan” of the page so you get my updates. networked blogs are different.
To get started on a fan page, go on your facebook and the bottom icons find “ads and pages” then pages, and you should be able to create one from there.
Let me know if you need any help with it.
October 5th, 2009 at 4:09 pm -
TechOfWeb said:
I have made fan page for my blog but didnt know that fan pages can also be made for individuals liks obama..Tahnks for sharing..me will now seriously xplore this opportunity for mine blog
Atul
November 11th, 2009 at 11:47 pm -
Our Tech Blog Log said:
Excellent Article , Congrats on reaching 2,000
January 6th, 2010 at 8:58 pm -
Ned Carey said:
Hey thanks for the tip. I am on facebook but don’t have a fan page yet.
I see this was written after Michael Jackson died. I doubt he will be update his fan page very frequently 🙂
April 1st, 2010 at 7:50 pm -
FAQ Software Agent said:
Thanks for the tips! I’ve been meaning to find a way to pimp out my fanpage more, although with everything that’s been going on in Facebook lately, I’m a little pertrubed.
May 27th, 2010 at 9:56 pm