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The recent changes to Facebook Pages mean that they are now an ideal vehicle for reaching people who are interested in what you do in your business.
Under the terms of service, your personal profile page is intended to be a way of staying in touch with friends and family, and you are only allowed to have one profile. Facebook frowns on personal profiles being used for business purposes and will disable accounts they suspect of doing so. Other restrictions include an upper limit of 5000 friends (this is also being relaxed as I write this post), and only being able to send messages to a small number at a time.
Not so with Pages. It seems that Facebook have recognised the need for small businesses to have a way to communicate their message with prospective clients. Setting up a Page and encouraging ‘fans’ (got to love that term!) to join means you then have a ready audience to market to. After all they choose whether they want to join your page or not, so you have permission to contact them (very important). Your page can be your business name, the name of a product or whatever you want, and it means you can keep your personal and business personas separate. Other changes include making the fan Page look and feel more like the profile – with lots of similar tabs, like a ‘wall’ to post comments and photos and for your fans to communicate with you.
The most important change, and the one that will benefit businesses marketing on the internet the most, is the status update on the fan Page. Currently, the update on your personal profile is sent to the updates section within your friends’ Inbox, which needs multiple clicks for them to access. But sharing an update from your Page to all your ‘fans’ will show up right in the Newsfeed on their Home Page. No more multiple clicking! In fact, this facility is like having Twitter functionality within Facebook! (or will be when it goes live properly on 11 March). Ed Dale (of 30 Day Challenge fame) has put together a very good video explaining the main differences between personal profiles and fan pages. You can watch it here http://www.ustream.tv/channel/thirty-day-challenge-tv
There are even more changes, including what Facebook call ‘Insights’ which are valuable stats on who is doing what on your page. There’s a helpful guide here http://www.facebook.com/advertising/FacebookPagesProductGuide.pdf and I recommend you get started and explore what a Facebook Page can do for your business right away!
About Louise
Louise Barnes-Johnston has been working in social media marketing since 2007 after realising that it was a powerful marketing tool which would enable her clients to raise the profile of their businesses on the internet, even when working to a limited budget. Her specialism is in researching social media practices; trying out the most effective online tools and then sharing the best of them with her clients.
Useful post. We’ve been wondering how to get a Facebook presence to work and this looks to be a step in the right direction. Well done for circulating it.
Thanks for commenting Neil, glad you found the post useful. Savvy Marketers will be keeping a close eye on the progress of Facebook pages!