Making Facebook Fan Pages for Fun and Profit

Right after I posted my quibbling post on whether to create a facebook fan page or not, I got an email from a partner who wanted, you guess it, a facebook fan page. Sometimes the universe responds to what you put out there.

Making a Facebook Fan Page is relatively straight forward, there are just a few key decisions you need to make right and you can be done in minutes. Assuming you want to make a page from your personal profile (it is possible to create one from a business account, but that is off topic for this post), you log in facebook, and click on “ads and pages” in the list on the left. Click on pages again, and you will get to the Facebook Create Page Interface.

Note that you have three choices, confusingly, none that call themselves a “Fan Page”:

• A Facebook Official Page
• A Community Page
• A Facebook Group

If what you want is a SEO friendly page to help market and brand your business, then what you want is the Official Page. However just to be complete, let’s look at the other options. The Official Page and Facebook Groups, when you create them, have one owner, you. However a Facebook Community Page, is intended to have many authors. Use a Community Page when you have a cause or topic that you want to gather a group around and create a discussion, but don’t use it to represent your brand. Facebook Groups can be useful for your business, however they are less useful from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective. Think of a Facebook Group as if you would a list you email to, and that is an approximate analogy. But you don’t “brand” a group of people you email, that is what the Official Page is for.

Ok now that is out of the way, we have a few more decisions to make.

Your next decision is to decide whether you are a local business, brand/product or a public figure. As far as I know this decision can’t be changed currently, so choose carefully. Once you have clicked on the option, you will get a drop down to define your choice further. In this case we are creating a fan page for a website about Breyer Horse Collectors, so I choose “website”. Finally you want to choose your page name. I went with all lower case no spaces because this is how the website name appears on the actual website: www.breyerhorsecollectors.com. Again this is something that can’t be changed later.

Click on “Create Official Page” and you are done! Now the next step is customizing and getting fans.

Related posts:

1. Facebook pages and applications .. oh my!
2. To Facebook Fan Page or Not, That is the Question
3. Facebook – even your parents use it
4. Will Facebook replace Email Marketing?
5. Facebook privacy scan tool – reclaimprivacy.org