More and more businesses are incorporating Facebook into their social media portfolio as a communications and marketing tool, capitalizing on Facebook’s traffic. It’s another point of presence for your business as Facebook Pages are public and search engines will display them in their results, best of all it’s free.
Facebook has Profiles and Pages, Profiles are used by individuals and Pages are for businesses. One item to note is that you must have a Facebook Profile to create a Page for your business. My company recently created a new Facebook Page for our business and we wanted to provide some tips to help avoid some of the pitfalls we discovered when we set up our original business Page.
Creating a Page is easy, log in to Facebook and navigate to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. You will need to select a category for your Page; “Local business”, “Brand, product, or organization” or “Artist, band or public figure”. The selection you make here will determine what information about your business you will be able to display on the Info Tab of your Facebook Page. When we created our first Page we chose “local business”. This selection has the limitation of only being able to display Website and Parking options for the Detailed Info on the Page’s Info Tab. Once you make your category selection you cannot change it and why we chose to create a new business Page, this time selecting the “Brand, product, or organization” category. With this selection we are able to display our Website, Company Overview, Mission, and Products details on the Page’s Info Tab – allowing you to enter a lot more information and searchable content.
Another important item is your Page Name. Unless you are a well known brand, you will want to use your company name and include a description of your products or services, for example ours is “ACTPLATINUM.com – ACT! by Sage CRM Consulting, Training and Software Sales”. By doing this your Page will display on the Facebook search results for any of the words used in your Page Name. Once you have at least 25 people “Like” your Page, you will be able to create a custom username to easily access your Facebook presence – for example ours is www.facebook.com/ACTPLATINUM.
Check the box stating you are the official representative and click the Create Official Page button – you have just created the Facebook Page for your business. Now let everyone know.
The next step should be promoting your company’s Facebook Page and start interacting with your visitors. Some ideas to generate interest are to offer a special deal, a contest or better yet something of value for free.
“Like” us on Facebook and you will receive a free Lookup Bad Email Addresses Utility for ACT! 2010 and ACT! 2009. With more and more companies using e-mail marketing and with the introduction of ACT!’s new E-marketing feature powered by Swiftpage E-mail the email address field in your database is very important. This is a great tool to quickly clean up the email address field for ACT!. Be sure to share your experience in using the utility with other ACT! users on our Facebook Page!
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