Creating a Facebook page, also known as a Facebook business page or Facebook fan page, is probably one of the best things you can do right now to boost your brand, small business, non-profit, or political campaign. Some marketing experts believe capturing your Facebook page name (along with your Twitter URL) is proving almost as important as capturing your Internet domain name. And best of all, it’s free to get started.
There are several other good tutorials available, but I decided to write my own focused on the basics. At some point, you may decide to get ambitious enough to hire a team of programmers to create custom Facebook applications and page tabs. But you want to focus on the basics before you get dazzled by the possibilities of “s-commerce”, or immersed in the complexities of programming in Facebook Markup Language (FBML).
The first three things you want to do are the simplest:
- Register your page
- Invite friends and customers to “Like” the page (register to get your updates)
- Secure a unique page name. This appears like a directory under facebook.com, giving you an address pegged to your brand that you can print on business cards and promote in all the same ways you advertise your Internet domain. For example, Carr Communications is at www.facebook.com/carrcomm
Step #2 is a prerequisite for Step #3 because Facebook will not let you establish a name or “username” for your page until you have a minimum number of people “Like” your page. At this writing, you need 25 Facebook fans. And you want to secure the name that is the best match for your brand before someone else gets it.