Setting up a Facebook page isn’t the drama it might appear to be. Here is a quick tutorial through setting one up.

1. To set up a page, you need a personal profile

While this might appear a little bit silly, it really isn’t. Facebook pages need you to have a profile, because it sets you as an administrator of that page.

So – the first thing you need to do (if you haven’t done it already) is set yourself up on Facebook.

You needn’t be worried that people who interact with your page will see your personal profile, because they won’t. This is the beauty of running a page as opposed to trying to promote your business using a personal profile. For more information about keeping your business and your personal profile separate, read our article here.

2. Find the link to setting up a page

This can be slightly difficult to find. So, to help you, the link is here.

Select which type of page you want to create (business, brand, artist), give it a name, tick the authority box, and hit ‘create official page’.

When you name your page, try to give it as accurate a name as possible. In some cases, the name you want might be taken. If it is, don’t panic: just try to think of an alternative name that still represents your business. If you run a photography business, for example, you could add ‘photography’, or ‘studio’, or something similar to the end of the name.

3. Make the page profile as complete as possible

Once you have created your page, you will be faced with a huge variety of options. The best thing to do is make it as complete as possible.

Choose a representative image for the page’s picture, such as your logo. Complete your business address, business hours, and any other information that is relevant.

Hot tip: Your profile image is constrained by width, not height. If you want to maximise the branding space available to you, make a tall skinny image. One idea is to join your logo to other images relating to do your business. For example:

Zoo Studio make great use of their logo image

Once you set up your page, Facebook will step you through the parts that you need to complete. It will also prompt you if the page is not fully filled out.

4. About page URLs

You can choose a specific URL for your page, but only once you have a certain number of people who ‘like’ it. When you get to that level, your URL will be http://www.facebook.com/NAMEHERE.

The best way to choose your URL is to make it the same – or as close as possible – to the name of the page itself.

5. Start posting, and inviting people to connect

Now comes the exciting part! You can start posting to the page’s profile: statuses, photos, links, and so on – just like you would with your own profile page.

Once you have some content on your page, click ‘suggest to friends’ on the left-hand side, and invite everybody you think would be interested.

After this point, it’s all about interacting and building your social network. There are many ways you can do this. For example:

• add ‘join us on Facebook’ links to your web site
• add your Facebook page link to your email signature
• and so on.

For more tips about building your Facebook network, read our article here.

The Facebook social network is an enormous, captive audience. But is it worth putting advertisements in front of them? This case study says ‘Yes’.

Perhaps the most important thing about Facebook’s captive audience is that each user provides a lot of information about themselves when they sign up. This is demographic information that your adverts take advantage of.

But does buying advertisements on Facebook give you enough return on your investment to make it worthwhile?

Our copywriter decided, at the end of July 2010, to test the system. She publishes an online music magazine that has a fan page on Facebook. Just prior to setting up the adverts, this page had reached 3000 fans, through an aggressive campaign to get more numbers. While the magazine is global, the Facebook Ad Test was limited to Australians, aged 13 and up. No further demographics were specified.

Facebook advertising gives you the ability to spend as much, or as little, as you want to. For this test, the maximum spend was set at $1 per day, for one month. This provides approximately 15,000 impressions (or views) every day during that period of time.

And then it was a matter of sitting back and waiting.

The way that Facebook page adverts work is this. The profile image, or logo, from your page is the main image. Underneath it is its title and a tag line. And accompanying it is a ‘Like’ button. If you have friends that are already fans, it will tell you how many of them also like the page. If they are good friends of yours, you will be likely to check it out because your tastes are likely to be similar. That, and there is safety in numbers.

Within 24 hours of the campaign running, this page had gained another 140 fans. The numbers climbed steadily for a week to a week and a half, and stayed steady, and then they spiked just prior to the campaign’s end. Where the page had been getting approximately 14-20 clicks per day, by the end of the campaign it spiked at 229. Then it rapidly dropped off again. Whether this spike is an anomaly, or whether more impressions were delivered that day, is anybody’s guess.

Overall, this campaign delivered:

406,260 impressions (or views), and yielded approximately 600 clicks (or ‘likes’). This is a click-through rate of 0.147%, at a total cost of $31.

The financials:

$1 per day, over one month was $31. In financial terms, this advert cost such a stupidly low figure per view that it’s not worth calculating. And for those who did become fans, it works out at roughly $0.05 per click.

Let’s compare these figures to buying print advertising. There is no way that you could deliver 400,000 print brochures at a cost of $31. To buy a classified advertisement in a local newspaper might cost you about $30; but you can’t measure how many views it will get, and it’s hard to find out the conversion rate. And you certainly don’t get national coverage with it.

The result:

The result of the Facebook campaign is that the page now has over 3600 fans, with absolutely no effort for the last 600. Up until that 3000 figure, it took a year and a half of continual effort, interaction, and encouragement to get people recommending the page through their own networks. And prizes. Let’s not forget that the 3000th fan won a substantial prize pack just for becoming a fan.

How this could be improved?

The click-through rate is fairly low; 2% is considered a highly successful campaign, according to Wikipedia. What this tells us is that the advertisement itself probably needs to be tweaked. Its title may need to be changed, its tag-line needs to be improved. One further month of testing, with an adjusted advert, might yield greater results.

But so could focusing the campaign elsewhere in the world, where the audience might be slightly different, or more in tune with the magazine. Or by tweaking the demographic focus, so that all impressions are delivered to a smaller sample.

Either way, this test provides a roadmap for further forays into what is a very cheap and effective advertising campaign.

Check out our more recent blog on Facebook Advertising.

So you’ve got your business blog, and you’re now on Facebook and Twitter. You’re keen to dive in and start trying to grow your networks. Awesome! Here is the first in a two-part series about growing your networks. We start with Facebook.

If you have a personal Facebook page, it’s worthwhile watching trends on your homepage for a while. If you do, you’ll notice that people get excited, anxious, depressed, happy, or enthused, with amazing speed. And if they like something, they’ll share it. Facebook is great for viral posts, and comments that you might not have otherwise gained. It’s a good idea to watch how people react to content on this social network, because it will give you a good idea about how you can exploit it.

1. Post interesting content, regularly

It’s great to syndicate what you do on your blog or news page. Chances are, the people who read your work on Facebook don’t go to your blog. What you want to do is post interesting things that you do, and interesting things that other people do – to show that you’re connected.

The key to a good Facebook page for a business is post regularity. If your page doesn’t post content, then it dies socially. It needs to be out there and active, like that super popular extrovert at high school.

2. Interact, interact, interact

The key to Facebook is interaction. So you need to check your page, reply to comments, ‘like’ comments that you genuinely like or that are relevant, and keep people talking. It doesn’t matter if the conversation strays from the point. Conversations do that! The key is to make sure that you are involved, and creating the right impression.

3. Recommend all your friends join your page

This one is fairly obvious. If you start a page for your business, recommend it to everybody you know, everybody you think might appreciate it, and send them a note telling them why. It’s a great way of getting some immediate notice, and many people’s friends will join simply because they don’t want to offend you.

And, once your friends become a fan, their networks will see it. If your page looks interesting enough to your friends’ broader network, you’ll get even more fans.

4. Have network goals and make them obvious

One of the great things about Facebook is a ‘fan count’. On all dedicated Facebook pages, it will tell you how many people like it. When you start growing your network, wait until you have a decent number of fans, and then start pushing a goal. For example, if you have 276 fans, offer a challenge to your fans. Use a status like: ‘Can we get 300 fans by the end of the month?’

Enthusiastic fans will say ‘of course!’ and start recommending you to their friends. Note that this won’t work as well if you don’t have a good relationship with your fans.

You can always offer gifts for milestone fans: 100, 500, 1000. This makes people even more enthusiastic.

5. Consider Facebook adverts

The type of advertisement best to consider is one of those small page adverts with ‘xx people like this’ under it. They are cheap (you can set your budget, like $1 or a certain number of impressions per day), and targeted (i.e. location, age, interests).

Even if you don’t do it straight away, it is worth considering. People like to follow a crowd. If you have fifteen friends who like a particular page, chances are you will at least visit the page to have a look at what it is, and you will consider becoming a fan yourself.

6. Avoid the hard sell

Once your network is growing, you have warm and regular interactions, you can start selling things. Be wary though that trying to do the hard sell is likely to cause you to lose fans. People join Facebook for fun and interaction, not to be sold to.

7. Have fun!

Enjoy your time running your Facebook page. Building your social networks needn’t be a chore, but it can take a bit of strategic thought. Once you get into it and start enjoying it, your fans will sense it through what and how you post. The flow-on effect is, of course, that you’ll be more likely to do it regularly: which brings us right back to point #1!

It might be tempting to promote your business on Facebook from your personal account. Before you do, stop and think carefully because it can be a bad idea. Here are 4 good reasons why you should avoid it.

1. Personal is personal, business is business

If you are considering promoting your business from your personal account, let me ask you something. How much do you want your clients to see what you post as your status? Chances are, not much.

We all have times where we like to whinge about things, swear, get excited, share content that shocks, or whatever. If your clients are connected to your personal Facebook account, it is likely that you will eventually regret it. And then you can’t delete them, because they would get offended.

2. You don’t want to bore your friends

Sure, your mates all know you run a business, but how many of them want to hear you go on about it? Not many, I bet. Bore them enough, and they will simply ignore you, or – worst case – hide you from their news feeds.

More to the point, your friends are unlikely to be your business’s target audience. You are far better off focusing your business on where it will have the most impact.

3. Dedicated pages = dedicated fans

One of the most important things about a dedicated business page on Facebook is that it is specific. Focusing specifically on what you do, how you do it, and interesting things about your business is easier to promote. It also means that when you start getting active about growing your network, it keeps you personally out of it. You will have a ‘product’ (your business’s page) that you can promote, rather than trying to promote yourself.

It’s a pretty tight Catch-22. And this alone is a great reason to keep your personal account personal, and to set your business up as itself.

4. Personal accounts don’t go viral; pages do

The viral nature of social networks is what makes them so valuable to businesses and products. With this in mind, it’s worthwhile noting that personal accounts don’t go viral. Pages do.

And if you have a dedicated page, you can make sure it starts to do the rounds by creating a growth strategy for it.

Very few network growth strategies would work effectively from a personal account. But there are some excellent ways of doing it for pages.

Keep your eyes peeled, because in our next article we bring you key strategies and tips for growing your business’s Facebook network.