Facebook has now moved from being not only a social network for personal use but is now considered (more prominently) a platform for business use as well. More and more marketers use Facebook as a key medium for their brands online. During the overall redesign of Facebook, Business Pages acquired some new changes as well. These new Business Pages now imitate the same Wall and tabs design as that of normal profiles. Business Pages maintain the same functionality – the ability to share photos, videos, text, applications and custom content. With focus placed on the Wall tab, Pages will feel much more dynamic than before. This will promote more participation and interaction between brands and their readers, inevitably helping to establish a better relationship. Content posted on the new Wall will also appear in Fans’ News Feeds. This means that posting updates to your Page is much more effective and has the potential to drive significant traffic to your Page. The Status Update will provide a powerful way for Pages to share short interesting bits. Brands that use Twitter can merge their accounts so that selected Tweets will automatically post to Facebook as Status Updates.
Nick O’Neill in his article How to Develop A Facebook Page that Attracts Million of Fans provides 10 tips for creating engaging Facebook Pages. I will only touch on a few of them but all of them are in the end vital for promoting a brand and bettering the overall brand experience.
An important tip Nick mentions is to integrate applications to increase engagement. According to Nick “the last thing you want is for users to land on your Facebook Page and leave immediately”. There are currently over 55,000 applications on the Facebook platform and a quite large portion of them can be directly incorporated into your fan page. Games, quizzes, and other types of interactive content can help keep users on your Facebook Page for longer durations of time. It is important to grab the attention of your users and keep it.
To establish a concrete relationship with fans and clients it is important to communicate with them continuously. Social media has always been about joining the conversation and now brands can be a significant part of the conversation on Facebook. These conversations can take place within a Facebook Page as well as in a user’s news feed. That means every time someone comments on a status, a photo, or a discussion thread, you need to comment on it. However, your social media strategy should still continue to include other outlets (blogs, Twitter, etc). It is important to remember that your fans/clients are also human – they are just like you.
Another point Nick emphasizes is to publish interesting and relevant content. Just like in other areas of social media (blogs, Twitter, etc), it’s central to provide exciting content to your readers. As part of this pointer, the next tip focuses on reposting. Just like Twitter, reposting information is basically the same as a retweet. By reposting a person’s information, they will be more likely to pay attention to your brand.
Facebook Pages present an exciting opportunity for brands to directly engage with their existing and future customers and harvest new ones. It is and has been a known fact that the more time you invest in your brand’s Facebook page, the better response you’ll get.
Over the past few years Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rise in new user adoption. Just to put things intoperspective, here are the Top 5 Facebook pages and their statistics:
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Continuing the Discussion