Expand Your Business Reach Using Facebook As Social Media

Started as a humble site for college kids to locate one another, Facebook has evolved and has even created great advertising opportunities for small business owners to take advantage of. And those opportunities have become even more powerful with the creation of Facebook Fan pages.

Facebook Fan pages allow you to officially represent your business on Facebook. You get to give your “fans” and customers a unified place to hold conversations about you, to get updates on what you’re doing, interact with you, and connect with other people who are “just like them” and love your products.

Here are some quick steps for how to create your Facebook Fan page to get the most out of it.

1. Set it up: First head to the Pages screen to get started creating yours.
2. Select your category/title: For most, you’ll want to click the Local option and select the appropriate category from the drop down menu. On the same screen, you’ll be prompted to give your page a title. This should be the name of your business, with keywords included when possible. For example, if the name of your wedding boutique is Stella’s, you can get away with titling your page [ Stella’s Wedding Boutique]. These pages will rank in the search engines, so keywords are your friends.
3. Add a profile picture: These photos are quite larger than the profile pictures for personal pages, so pick something that will translate well. It can be a logo, a personal photo, a photo of your storefront, etc.
4. Add company information: In this step you’re going to add all your basic store information, the same you would if you were filling out a Google Local profile or business listing.  Include your name, URLs, date the company was founded, an overview of what you do and your mission statement.
5. Build it out: Make your page stand out and unique by adding engaging content via your Tabs that that will attract users and keep them coming back to your page. That means adding videos, photo galleries, importing your blog, useful Facebook applications, incorporate coupons, etc.
6. Publish your page: Find the publish button. Hit it.
7. Find Fans: Once you’re all set up, become a fan of the page yourself. Then, send it to your colleagues and friends and invite them to Fan the page, as well. Do a search on Facebook for what you do and look for people in your area or networks who list it as an interest.
8. Advertise the page: Once the page has been built and Fans have been found, get the page (and your company) more exposure by using Facebook’s ad program to drive more people to the page. Facebook has an incredibly powerful ad program that I would recommend all SMB owners look into. Because of the personal nature of Facebook, users enter in all sorts of important buying information. They tell you how old they are, where they live, what they’re interested in, favorite bands, likes, dislikes, etc. The Facebook ad program allows you to target your ads based on ALL of this information. That means if you sell wedding gowns, you can set it so that your ads only appear for people between a certain age, who live within 20 miles of your store and who are currently listed on Facebook as being engaged. You can’t beat that kind of targeting.

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