How To Set Up A Successful Business Page on Facebook

Untitled Document How To Set Up A Successful Business Page on Facebook Digital Media Branding Podcast Episode 23 In this episode we will go over all the details on how to set up a successful business page on Facebook. So if you use Facebook to generate leads or help your business in any way, this episode is for you. Welcome to the Digital Media Branding Podcast. I’m your host Carlos Quintero from MediaOnQ. MediaOnQ is a Full Service Digital Media Branding and Marketing Agency based out of Fargo, ND. At MediaOnQ we provide social media branding and marketing services to more than 250 business across the US and Canada. Social Media has become an essential component in today’s marketing campaigns and strategy. So it is no longer just a good idea to have a page for your business on Facebook. Facebook offers your business one of the most active social media networks. This active community can help your business establish and grow it’s brand as well as benefit from your followers because your followers will help establish trust and influence for your business. Facebook can also help enhance your business visibility on the web by helping you distribute your content. It can even help your SEO efforts. Unfortunately to take full advantage of all the benefits that Facebook can offer our business it will take more than just setting up the business page. First impressions matter and a professional looking Facebook design will help your business stand out and impress visitors and followers. So I’d like to go over the various design elements or the anatomy of a successful business page on Facebook in hopes that it might help you get more out of our social media marketing efforts. And should you need help along the way just shoot me an email at studio@mediaonq.com and I will do what I can to help. Some of you may not know that I was a Sargent in the US Army back in the early 90s. One planning technique that has stuck with me from my Army days is backwards planning. So I’d like to start by going over the goal of this Facebook business page. We want to the Facebook business page to: Help us express our brand identity through cover art and graphics. We’ll want to showcase important business information about our products and services. We’ll want our content to cover tips, stats, photos and business news for our target audience. And we’ll want to be responsive to the engagement that our content produces.   When you are building or designing your Facebook business page, you really should treat it just like any other professional web asset your company may have. What I am referring to as a web asset includes your website, landing pages, splash pages and directory service pages. So remember this is how your business will be represented on Facebook. And don’t take shortcuts; take the time to align your company’s brand and business strategy with the Facebook page so that you can start to benefit from the results. Let’s take a look at the design elements that will help us reach our business goals. #1 Make a Custom URL A custom URL is the actual web address that you would type to get to your Business Page on Facebook. With a custom URL you can easily direct your visitors to your Facebook page. For example, MediaOnQ’s custom URL is http://www.Facebook.com/MediaOnQ. Having a custom URL for your business on Facebook increases your visibility in search engines like Google and Bing, which helps your SEO efforts. It’s important that you set up a custom URL or vanity URL as it is often called, so that your social media presence can be more professional and of course personalized which in turn, helps brand your business. And because we are branding our business it then becomes important that we maintain consistency when setting up custom URLs on other channels like Google+ and Twitter. Moving on to #2 Maximize The Tabs Did you know that Facebook provides 12 different content subpages also called Apps or Tabs right on your Facebook page? You can use these Tabs to benefit your business. Even if you don’t have enough content to use up all 12 Tabs, it is important that you have a minimum of 4 Tabs with content because it helps give visitors a reason why to like your page and why they should follow you. You can add Tabs for your company videos, user groups, quick tips or notes for your audience, customer success stories and company events. You can even add Tabs that pull content directly from your website. Always keep in mind the original Goals for this page when coming up with what to put in these Tabs. Let’s move on to #3 Design a Unique ABOUT Section While it is simple to think that filling out the form fields that Facebook offers in the About section is enough…consider this. There are two main sections that matter. The first is ABOUT and the second is Description. So I’d like to suggest that we are strategic with the ABOUT section. Make sure that you include your company’s contact information in this section. The idea is to make it easy for visitors to contact you so that they can learn more about the products or services that you have to offer. Be sure to include your company’s unique value proposition and don’t forget to link them back to your own website. If you surf around Facebook you may notice that this approach is not common, which can help your content stand out from the rest. Now in the DESCRIPTION section, we will want to add content that includes relevant Keywords to our business so that this section can tie back to our own site’s SEO strategy. Taking this approach will help maximize your search potential. I say this to my clients all the time. Is there anything wrong with the following? Say someone is on Google looking for your product or service. Wouldn’t you want to hold 3 or 4 spots in the search results? If someone clicks on the link that takes them to your website, that’s wonderful. And if someone clicks on the link to your Facebook page, that’s wonderful too because we made sure that your contact information and links were on your ABOUT section of the page. That is what I mean when I say we can maximize search potential. #4 Use Custom APPS What can custom APPS do for your Facebook page and business? These custom APPS can help drive traffic to your website, your inventory of products or services as well as encourage customers and prospects to LIKE your Facebook page. There are lots of options in this space. PageModo, Constant Contact, Wildfire Apps and MyTab are some of those options. These types of APPS provide all of the technology you need to create quizzes, contests and sweepstakes. APP features, usability and prices vary so take the time to find the ones that best meet your own budget and goals. There are also other social media channels that offer their own APPS that allow you to take content you publish with them and place it directly into your Facebook page. Pinterest and YouTube are two examples of that. You upload a video on YouTube and it can be posted directly on to your Facebook page. This works in a similar way with Pinterest, if you pin something new, it can be displayed on your Facebook page. While I’m on this subject I want to remind you to think about Keywords and SEO when posting content on your social media channels. Your posts and content should not only link back to your website but the Keywords should support your own company’s SEO. And now… #5 Design to Drive Traffic to Your Website I touched on this briefly in #3 where we designed a unique ABOUT section. So we’ve already added a company description, link back to our website and included our phone numbers. Now let’s talk about the photos section. It is important that any photo that is available on your Facebook page is also available on your own website. Our strategy here is to post smaller photos here and add a note in the photo description offering the viewer a higher resolution version of this picture directly on your website. Moving on to… #6 Consider Professionally Designed Graphics Facebook is a place where your potential customers will interact and engage with your company’s brand, products and services. Hi quality graphics on your Facebook page will help you stand out and catch more eyeballs. Here are some graphic sizes that will help you get the most out of the image branding that is available on a Facebook page. Thumbnail image for your logo should fit into a 180 X180 pixel box. The graphic should be easily identifiable when it is scaled down to 32 X 32 pixels. The timeline profile image should be 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high. If you upload any other dimension, it will be scaled to fit this size. And pay attention to the TAB thumbnail to ensure that it is displaying what you’d like to share with your audience. We’ve just covered the design elements or anatomy of a successful business page on Facebook. The key is to take the time to set up the business page so that it accurately represents your business. Putting in this effort will help your company stand out, drive traffic to your website, engage with customers and prospects and contribute to your SEO strategy. I hope that you found this information useful and would like to ask you to please subscribe on iTunes, leave us a review and share this with a business owner or marketing professional. If you need help with your social media marketing efforts, MediaOnQ is here to help. Email us at studio@mediaonq.com. If you have any other suggestions or Facebook business page strategy that you would like to share please send it to studio@mediaonq.com and I will make sure to update the blog post so that we can all benefit from the information. Join me next week where we’ll continue to discuss digital media branding and marketing strategies that help us compete in today’s web economy. Until next time, I’m Carlos Quintero from MediaOnQ. Thank you for listening.