Marketing Your Business on a Facebook Page
Facebook is one of the fastest growing social networking sites. It is about communicating, engaging and building relationships. It is about creating a community of people who are interested in what you have to say or share their thoughts and opinions. This works for individual people and for businesses.
Facebook offers a way for businesses to have a presence in a way that is similar, yet different from the profiles of a person. Businesses create pages or groups, while individuals create profiles. You attract people to you by sharing information, knowledge, building up their trust in you until they have reached a point where they are open to doing business with you.
There are a number of distinct differences between profiles and pages in Facebook.
- Profiles: Represent a real person and have only one administrator. Profiles have “friends” that must be accepted. Individuals can send messages to other people and up to 20 friends and friends can always message each other. There is no access to aggregate traffic statistics.
- Pages: Represent a real business and may have many administrators. Pages have “fans” and requests are automatically accepted. Administrators can send updates to all subscribed fans, but fans cannot reply to these updates. There are detailed reports for aggregate traffic statistics broken down by demographics.
Creating a Facebook Page: A page isn’t a separate account, it is an entity that is created and managed thru a person’s account (or thru several people’s accounts). To create a business page:
- Login to facebook.com with a username and password.
- At the bottom of the page, click on the Advertisers link.
- Click on the “Create Facebook Page.”
- Follow the instructions and set-up can take 5 minutes to a few hours, depending on how much customization you want to do.