3 Steps to Building an Effective Facebook Fan Page

With more than 800 million users worldwide, Facebook is here to stay. That means building a presence for your business website on this global social network almost mandatory. However, if you have yet to venture very far into the world of social media, understanding how to build and maintain your brand’s presence on these user-oriented sites can prove challenging.

Let’s discuss how you can harness the power of Facebook to promote your business effectively and ethically, using the widespread appeal of fan pages. Here’s what you need to know:

Step 1: Assess your industry’s social-networking participation.

The first step to building an effective Facebook fan page is to assess what your social-networking goals are. Facebook counts people of every age, race, gender, industry, and so on among its members, but they don’t all use the site in the same way.

For example, a teenager — whose entire life has been captured digitally — may use Facebook to play online games and to engage with friends and family members by sharing personal pictures and frequent status updates. Meanwhile, a mother of a growing family may use the site to update far-flung relatives about her children and to pick up coupon codes and freebies from brands she likes. Thus, if your business targets teenagers, you’ll want to set up and market your Facebook fan page in a significantly different way than you would to cater to the mom in our example. Your goals should differ, too.

In addition, you may find a significant variance among industries in terms of user engagement on social-networking sites. If you sell farm supplies, for example, you might find that online participation is high on industry-specific forums and message boards, but that users in this industry don’t typically turn to Facebook to connect with brands or retailers.

Really, the only way to determine how engaged your visitors are with your Facebook page (and, consequently, how much you should invest in developing it) is to test it out. Every business should have at least a basic fan page. Start by visiting https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and adding the minimum amount of information necessary for your chosen page type. You can build your page out later to include more features, as appropriate.

Run your page for a month or two — and collect data. Be sure to consider both your Facebook Insights data and the number of visitors your business website receives as a percentage of your overall traffic (as determined through the creation of an Advanced Segment targeting Facebook traffic within your Google Analytics account). If you see interest in your fan page, consider expanding it to make it more engaging for your community. If not, simply leave it alone.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to wait to generate data, you can also determine whether or not a built-out Facebook fan page makes sense for your business by examining what your competitors are doing. Check up on your closest competition: If you see that most of your rivals have invested in fully customized fan pages, chances are it will be a worthwhile effort for your business, too.

Step 2: Set specific, measurable goals.

If your analysis from Step 1 concludes that there is interest in Facebook fan pages within your industry, the next step to making your page as effective as possible is to set measurable goals that help you determine whether or not your social-networking efforts are creating a positive ROI for your business.

Although the goals most relevant to your business will vary, consider any of the following options:

• [X] Number of fan page “likes” — When users visit your fan page, they’ll have the option of “liking” your brand. If a user clicks this button, updates from your page will appear in their news feeds, making it a potentially powerful way to increase your brand awareness. However, note that more “likes” doesn’t automatically correlate to more sales, so be cautious of focusing all your efforts on simply increasing this number.
• [X] Number of website visitors — As mentioned above, you can track the number of visitors who arrive on your website from Facebook, which is, by and large, the purpose behind setting up a fan page in the first place. Consider setting a goal to obtain a certain number of website visitors and to have that number increase over time.
• [X] Sales resulting from Facebook traffic — Of course, just because you’re getting more visitors from Facebook doesn’t mean that these people are buying anything on your site! To track how many Facebook visitors result in sales, you can either deploy Facebook-specific coupon codes that allow you to track which purchases originated on Facebook or set up Goals tracking within Google Analytics. When paired with the Facebook traffic Advanced Segment described earlier, this will allow you to pinpoint conversions from Facebook visitors, as well as determine how this revenue is changing over time.

Remember: The initial goals you set up should merely be a starting point for your Facebook fan page marketing campaign. As you get more involved with the site, you’ll begin to better understand its potential for your business, so be sure to take the time to periodically re-evaluate the goals you’ve set up for yourself to determine if they should be tweaked or expanded based on your results.

Step 3: Be active with your Facebook fan page.

Now that you have a better understanding of what your Facebook fan page should be like and how you can ensure that it’s performing as well as it could be, it’s time to get active!

The thing about Facebook — and other social-networking websites — is that they aren’t “set it and forget it” activities. Social media sites rely on constant participation, so your followers won’t be impressed if you simply create your fan page and then never check back to interact with these potential customers.

For best results, it’s a good idea to check in to your Facebook fan page at least once a day (or more often if you run a popular company in a highly engaged industry). When you check in, take the time to post a status update and respond to any followers who have asked you questions or commented on your fan page. Your status updates don’t need to be long. For instance, you could mention a product that you’ve recently started carrying, a promotion you’re running, or even your comments on a juicy bit of news in your industry.

Keep in mind, though, that your fan page shouldn’t be composed entirely of marketing messages. Social-networking participants are extremely sensitive to being “over sold,” so take the time to include messages that provide value to your followers without any ulterior, commercial motives. With continued effort and a focus on creating an active, dynamic environment for your followers, there’s no doubt that you’ll start to see a positive impact on your business’s bottom line from your social-networking promotions.

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