5 Free Business Tips for Facebook Pages

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How do I use Facebook to enhance my company, church, organization, or club?

As a person who utilizes Facebook in the repetoir of how I make my living, I get this question a lot. With hundreds of millions of Facebook users out there, and huge growth in the adult demographic, it makes sense for people to shift marketing efforts to Facebook. The trick is doing it without looking like an idiot.

What do you recommend? Here are my  5 things with Facebook. It’ll be the best marketing you can do in the next 1 hour, trust me. Just like anything else… nail the basics and everything else is just gravy.

Preamble: You need a page, not a group. If you only have a group right now… go create a page. Facebook is not investing in making the group experience better. All of their efforts for businesses are focused on pages.

1. Secure your URL. Once your page has 100 fans, you can go to facebook.com/username and secure a unique URL. This will help you on a lot of fronts. First, it’s easy to remember. Tell people, “Like our product? Become a fan on Facebook at Facebook.com/yourcompany.” I’m seeing this everywhere! I was at a golf course a couple weeks back that had a fan page. Hotels have it. Designers have it. Even dive bars have fan pages. Second, this helps your company on the Google front as well. It’ll make it easier for people looking for you and your products to find you… not your competitor. If you are a company that has brands/products it’s a good idea to also add a fan page for your top products.

2. Add FBML. With the page application FBML, you’ll be able to build a landing page for your fans. Here’s an example of mine from Youth Specialties. Here’s another one from Coke. FBML allows you to design HTML code and drop it into your page as a tab. Then in the page settings you can select which tab is the default landing page. With both the Coke and YS pages you see that it introduces the brand and products pretty strongly, right away. If you aren’t a web guru, I’d still add FBML and have your web designer pimp it out. (Or send me $500 and I’ll do it for you.)

3. Embed video or audio. Up until recently, Facebook has not allowed applications like FBML to embed stuff. It basically stripped out <embed> and <script> tags in the coding. But if your brand has some great audio/video that you think could help you sell your products, here’s a little hack.

Bear in mind you need to host these files on your own host, but that’s cheap and easy enough.

For video, you can embed FLV files using this code: <fb:flv src="Flash_Video_URL" height="###" width="###"/>

For audio, you can embed MP3 files using this code: <fb:mp3 src="URL HERE" height="###" width="###" artist="artist" title="title" album="picture"/>

That may not be a beginners option, but if you can pull it off it looks fantastic!

4. Connect your company website/blog to your Facebook page. If your website was designed in the last 3-4 years it probably has RSS feeds. It’s simple and easy to import an RSS feed from your website onto your page. Here’s the link.

5. Add your Facebook page Fan Box to your company website or blog. Complete the circle. You are sending your content to Facebook, allow your customers to see your precense on Facebook from your website.

That’s it. Those are the basics. Nail those 5 things down and you are off to a good start. In fact, I wouldn’t add much else to a Facebook page. Just make sure to update your status from time to time.


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14 responses to “5 Free Business Tips for Facebook Pages”

  1. Sara Grivas Avatar

    GREAT article Adam! I did some of the things but was able to add a few suggestions. EXCELLENT!
    I also found the Networked Blogs application of facebook is great to get your blog site to show up on your facebook page and if you connect it, your blogs will show up on your fans facebook page as well!!
    Great stuff!

  2. Adam Walker Cleaveland Avatar

    Great ideas….but here is my quandary. I’m the Youth/Young Adults pastor at our church. When I got here last year, I started up Facebook “Groups” for the church, for the youth group, for the young adults group, and for the college aged youth.

    So…if you were me, would you convert ALL of them to pages? I’m already in the process of converting the general church group to a Page,

    I’m just wondering if you think it’d be worth my time to create and manage all of those pages? I know why Pages are better, and so part of me thinks I should. What do others think?

  3. adam mclane Avatar

    Unless Facebook changes its mind, there isn’t any reason to have a group anymore. I’ve hard a rumor that they are willing to migrate a group to a page… but I’ve never done it. Basically, if your groups are actually using the group and are enjoying it… I’d leave it alone. But if you’re looking to tie your “sub-brands” together with the same look/feel as your “church brand” I’d suggest migrating over. I’m at the point where I’d suggest a Facebook page over a youth group website.

  4. ken Avatar

    Adam…you are the man. I love your not-so-new ministry. These kind of tips, man, this is so helpful for churches, man.

  5. Nick Arnold Avatar

    Added this goody to Delicious and will revisit when I get time to work on my Facebook pages. 🙂 Thanks for the tips. I hadn’t heard of FBML, this is great!

  6. nivash Avatar

    Coolest info about facebook i had ever read tanx for the info

  7. Phil Gear Avatar

    Thanks for the great facebook info! I’ll have to make myself a page!

  8. Johnson Avatar

    Nice tips for business thanks for nice info sharing.

  9. Lahiru Avatar

    Wow Interesting stuffs , I got an idea how to embed flash and mp3 for facebook page and also the “Secure your URL” , thanks Adam

  10. Kaci Avatar

    I have a really tricked out myspace page & I’ve always hated my facebook page. So, you’ve got to know what this article means to me 🙂 However, I said that to say this…By no means am I complaining but where do I embed codes. Also, can you PLEASE tell me how to add the fbml site? Once again, I really appreciate this 🙂

  11. […] Article detailing how to display videos, and play audio on facebook fanpages using a trick utilizing… […]

  12. Green Living 4 Live Avatar

    Interesting tips, I’ll apply about audio and videos.
    Thanks by share,

  13. Abrar Shahriar Avatar
    Abrar Shahriar

    Amazing.

    I really couldn’t have done it better. Social media is one of the best tools for collecting traffic and convert them.

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