Your Facebook Page Checklist

Part 1: Vanity Urls:

A Facebook vanity URL is a custom address for your Facebook page. When you first create your Facebook page, you’re given a default address like this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MyCrowdca/194124965846 and as you can see, it’s not exactly something people are likely to remember or recognize, there is very little branding power and all those numbers and extras are definitely not good for the SEO value.Read the rest: Vanity URLs

Part 2: Your Landing Page:

This is probably the single most important thing I can tell you about your Facebook page and getting the most from it: Never let new visitors to your Facebook page land on your wall. This is where you converse with and engage your existing customers and fans and is an important aspect to your Facebook page, but the fact remains, you do not have total control over it because it’s where other people post as well as you. Not allowing your customers and fans to post to your wall is not an option if you’re serious about your Facebook page doing well, because conversation is the whole purpose of social media. If you cut your customers off from engagement on your Facebook page, there’s really no point to having one. You might as well put up a large graphic that just says, “we’re not interested in what you have to say”. Not the most welcoming attitude.

So, to make sure you are encouraging conversation and engagement on your Facebook page, while still making sure your new users are not being put off by anything you haven’t got complete control over, you have to make sure your new visitors land on a static page that you do have 100% control over.

Read more: Your Landing Page

Part 3: Engagement:

A lot of people who set up social media accounts and pages miss the mark because they’re forgetting one thing: social media is called that because it is social. You must be social on social media, in order to benefit the most from it. You can’t just throw up a page and expect people to flock to it. If you build it, in fact, they will not come.So, how do you draw them in? Here are several tried and true tactics that will give you a great head start:

1. Suggest your Facebook page to friends by using the “Suggest to Friends” link under your logo. Ask your fans, friends and followers to do the same.

Read more: Engagement

Part 4: Your Photo:

The first thing people notice when they come across your Facebook page or are invited to it, is your page’s main photo. It is your very first impression and it needs to stand out. Here are some ways to get your photo to stand out:1. Have fun with the unchangeable aspects of a Facebook page such as the font colors and layout and lines along the top. Utilize the same fonts and font colors that Facebook uses to make it look as though part of your image is actually part of the page. The font Facebook uses is Lucida 11point and the font color is #3b5998.

Read More: Your Photo

Part 5: Integrating Other Social Networks

Most businesses with a Facebook page haven’t limited their social media efforts to just Facebook. Some also utilize Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Foursquare and maybe even a blog. If you’ve got other social accounts elsewhere, integrating them with your Facebook page is a great way to cross-promote and use your fanbase elsewhere to increase your fanbase on Facebook and vice versa.

There are many apps and plugins that can help you integrate your other social network accounts with your Facebook page, so lets cover a few of them.

Integrating your blog: So many people are afraid to blog, which is a shame as it’s such a fantastic way to get people to your web site, to create potentially viral content and to really give your customers, clients and fans a sense of who you are. If you have taken that leap, and are realizing how beneficial and actually fun blogging is, then you should integrate it into your Facebook page.

The best way to do this that I have found, is NetworkedBlogs. This is a Facebook application, and you can find it here: http://bit.ly/b70RGi – just click this link, then choose “Add to Page” under the logo, and choose the page you’re working on. Next you want to click “Go To Application” and allow it access to your Facebook info. Once you have installed the application, it will take you to the app itself, where you can click the “Register a Blog” button. Follow the steps to register your blog and once that is complete, you should have a blog profile page in the networked blogs app that looks something like this one: http://bit.ly/dlluJB. When you go to this page for your blog, click “Feed Settings” under the thumbnail image. On the following page, you will have the option to publish the feed to your personal wall, as well as all of your Fan Pages. Click “configure” next to the Fan Page you want to publish it to, and then make sure the button for “Auto-publish blog posts to Page Wall” is selected. At this point, you can publish a test post and go check out your wall to see that it’s working.

What this will do is, every time you post to your blog, a short snippet, a thumbnail and a link to the blog post will automatically be published to your Facebook page’s wall.

Read more: Integrating Other Social Networks

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