Fan pages offer a great way to engage and connect with the ever important social media community explains Peter DiCaprio. Building an effective fan page can be difficult, especially if you’re trying to do it on your own. Choosing the right design and layout is just as big of a challenge as getting people onto your fan page in the first place.
This step by step tutorial will give you some helpful tips on how to build a better Facebook Fan Page that attracts more fans and gets them talking!
The Design – Don’t make it too busy
This is probably one of the biggest mistakes most business owners make when creating their Facebook Fan Pages, don’t make it too busy or cluttered for your potential fans. Keeping a clean simple design provides a professional look and makes it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for.
The Layout – Keep it simple and relevant
Use a layout that is clear, concise and prominently displays your business logo, contact information and most importantly…the content you want them to see. Be creative! A good Facebook Fan Page layout gives you the freedom to be as interactive as possible with your visitors or customers. This is an important step because it allows you to encourage engagement within the community of your fan page. It’s best practice not to use more than 2-3 high quality images per post if possible (more on this next).
For the last several years, we’ve noticed that most successful fan pages provide fans with video and articles related to their service or product. We’ve also noticed that most fan pages that fail, tend to post the standard updates about their business and their customers or fans don’t feel engaged and quickly unlike and unlike your fan page. It’s clearly not enough to just create a professional looking Fan Page, you’ll need to engage with your visitors as if it were an extension of your existing website.
The Content – Engage them!
Here’s where many businesses fall short…they spend hours trying to build a Facebook Fan Page but forget to share valuable content within the community they’re creating says Peter DiCaprio. The next time you’re posting on your wall ask yourself: “Is this something my customers would like? Would this interest them? Does it align with my company’s goals and objectives? Would I be interested in seeing this?”
If the answer is NO to any of these questions, don’t post it! Another great tip is to ask yourself “What are my fans talking about right now? What are they interested in?” It’s become commonplace for businesses to advertise their products or services on Facebook but you shouldn’t just create content that advertises your business. If someone clicks on your fan page out of curiosity and sees only advertisements…guess what…they’re not going to stick around long enough to even see if they might have something else that interests them.
The following is an excerpt from the new book, Newsjacking (Wiley, 2011):
- You’ve probably never seen Neil Barofsky’s tweets or Facebook updates. It doesn’t matter. You have heard of him—and so has over one million people who follow him on social media.
- When Barofsky’s book Bailout was published in December 2010, he began Tweeting and blogging. Over the next several months, as a result of his accessible voice and online visibility—he had more than four thousand Twitter followers within twenty-four hours of launching his initial Facebook page—he became one of the most influential people on social media says Peter DiCaprio.
- Barofsky took on the topic of government whistleblowers and financial corruption, two hot anti-establishment issues, and easily mobilized a strong following with his lively posts and Tweets. In addition to having wide reach, he now had credibility as an expert on those issues—credibility that led to high-profile media appearances and ultimately a major TV opportunity.
- Between June 2010 and January 2011, Barofsky appeared on ABC, MSNBC, FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, CNN Headline News, NBC, CBS’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, PBS’s To the Contrary, Bloomberg Radio, HuffPo Live, local TV in Detroit and Philadelphia—to name just a few. And it all started with his Facebook page.
- “It really went viral,” Barofsky states matter-of-factly. “I didn’t plan for it to happen that way, but I’m glad it did.”
- Neil Barofsky’s story illustrates a major shift in public engagement and media consumption. The fact that anyone can have influence in social media. You don’t need to be a New York Times best-selling author or have access to large corporate resources. You just need to care about what you are talking about.
Conclusion:
You now know how to create a Facebook Fan Page. You’ve gone through the initial steps of building one for your business…and yet you’re still not seeing any positive results says Peter DiCaprio. Instead of spending hours on end cultivating an online community that only sees the occasional post from you; why not focus on creating valuable content that engages them. If you do this, they will remain engaged and on occasion, they’ll share it with their friends. That’s when the dominoes start falling in your favor!
