How To Set-Up & Maintain an Excellent Facebook Brand Page #2 – Personalisation

Welcome Back!

This has taken a little longer than I’d hoped to get round to, and I can blame all sorts of festivities but I’ll try not to… The upside is that your page will have had more time to create those first 25 likes. What we’re going to do from here is take your page from somewhere that it looks like any other basic Facebook page like this:

To something which shows more of the brand identity which you’ve worked hard on, like this estate agents page:

Step One: Become a Facebook Developer

Easier than it sounds, honestly! Simply log into your Facebook account then navigate to developers.facebook.com and simply allow access to that application. You’ll be taken to the developer centre after that, but for now you can get away from that page

Step Two: Create the content of your Facebook page

This step varies in trickiness depending on who will be doing the design work. Basically you want to end up with a single web page which is no more than 490px wide, but that is one of very few restrictions. So fire up your favourite web development program, or get your existing webmaster to do it for you. There are probably other options too, like plugins for WordPress which automatically create a simplified version of your website, but I don’t use them. I will happily do a bit of research though if anyone needs that information.

Step Three: Upload your Facebook page to your server

If you’ve got an existing member of your team to build the page, they’ll do this section for you too, just ask them for the address to it AND the secure address to it. Facebook will need them both.

If you’re doing this yourself, you now need to upload the files to your web hosting. I always contain them within one Facebook specific folder for simplicity, i.e. www.yourdomain.com/facebookpage.

Step Four: Create your first Facebook App

Back to the Developer Centre now, specifically https://developers.facebook.com/apps, and click on ‘+Create New App’. The popup asks you for some information, use your page name as the Display Name and for the Namespace you’ll use something which is lower case and without spaces, so I usually use the page name again. After a quick security check you’ve created your first app! Nearly there now…
While we’re here, take a note of your pages App ID (see below) because we’ll be needing it in a moment.

Oh, and edit those icons too to a block of colour that you use in your branding.

Step Five: Connect your content to your app

Staying on the same page now, scroll down to the heading ‘Select how your app integrates with Facebook’ and click ‘Page Tab’, which will open up a new set of options:

Fill out the first one with your company name, or ‘Welcome’ or ‘Home’, which will be shown beneath your profile picture of your page. The 2nd two are the information you got from your web developer, or that you know already because you did it yourself! Now simply ‘Save Changes’ and you’re ready to link the app to your page.

Step 6: Linking the App to your Facebook page

There will be a less silly way of doing this again soon, but Facebook decided to remove the option recently…

Now you simply need to put this address into your address bar:

http://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=[yourappid]&next=http://www.facebook.com/

Make sure you put your app id in the space shown, without the brackets. Facebook will ask you which page you’d like to link your app to, and you’ll simply select the page we made previously from the drop down box.

Done!

Next time we’ll sort out a vanity URL as well as talk a little about adverts.