How To Set-Up & Maintain an Excellent Facebook Brand Page #1 – Set-up & Design

Welcome, What You Need To Know Already, and A Disclaimer

Welcome to part 1 of a series specifically about making and maintaining excellent Facebook brand pages. I’m going to make an assumption right from the beginning: you know what a Facebook brand page is, and you want to build one to take advantage of the targeting possibilities to further your organisation (whether that be a traditional ‘business’, charity, school, or space programme).

While we’re on the subject of assumed knowledge and transparency: You can throw together a Facebook brand page far quicker and easier than you will learn to from me. It won’t work as well, but it’s certainly possible. Doing this is going to take some time, knowledge, and effort. If you’re willing to put that in then read on, if not then either don’t bother having a brand page or get someone else to do it!

First Steps

With that over with, firstly you’ll need to head over to the ‘create a page‘ link (you are logged into your Facebook account, right?). This is a relatively straight forward process, but here’s some tips:

• Please, please, please fill in as much information as you can. There aren’t many things lazier than not bothering to put the year your business started in, so make sure that (as well as everything else you can populate) is filled in.
• Put the email address as something specific to your Facebook presence – I generally like to use facebook@domain.com – if you don’t know how to do this then get your preferred web/IT guy or girl to do it. It’s a nice little way to know exactly how many email enquiries are coming direct from this page – and what’s the point in doing all this if you don’t build in ways to track how well it’s done from the start?
• Profile Picture: Most people just stick their logo in here, and that’s understandable. You can do a whole lot more than that though – the picture can be up to 540 pixels high, which means you can do things like this:

• Import your contacts – don’t skip this step! Ideally you’ll create a new .csv file which includes only the email addresses of current clients, and you’ll feed that into the ‘Import Contacts’ button first. Why? The people most likely to support your page early on are the people you already work with, they are less likely to mind that your page currently has zero ‘likes’.

What To Do Next

At this point, you’ll be taken to a page somewhat like the below, albeit with your business/charity name and a well implemented profile picture:

Well Done!

Now what? Well, you’ve invited some of your current customers/clients to ‘like’ the page so let’s wait for that to happen – ideally you want to have at least 25 for the next step. During that time, make a minimum of a daily update to your ‘fans’ telling them what your organisation is up to. That DOES NOT mean sell to them, it means encourage engagement. Right now, at this early stage, you will mostly be talking to yourself but these updates are absolutely worth the time and effort as they mean your page will have a little more life in it than the deserted town it resembles right now.

Next Time…

Next time we’ll go through custom landing pages, encouraging people to press the ‘like’ button without being intrusive, and we might even get to promoting your page!