Building a Facebook Page

Alice Cheetham shares her tips on creating a Facebook page. If you have any additional feedback you would like to share, please do send in a comment.

I’ll admit, we do talk a lot about Facebook, but boasting over 500 million active users and said users spending over an estimated 700 BILLION minutes per month alone on Facebook, you can’t blame us.

This month, as you might have noticed, we’re talking channels here at Rocktime and what better than one with such popularity as Facebook!

We’ve talked before about Facebook Pages, namely in our article ‘Facebook Pages – Building the REAL community’, well worth a look at in preparation for putting together or optimising your businesses’ page. Returning to the topic of tips for Facebook, now we’re looking into top tips for building your page.

Firstly, don’t let your landing page default to your wall! Instead, make use of the custom tabs to put together something engaging and eye catching and most importantly, completely under your control.

Why don't you want new users come to your wall first? Well bear in mind, depending on your page’s privacy settings, it could be that anyone can post on your wall, not necessarily new-visitor friendly. Coding for custom tabs used to be exclusively written in FBML – Facebook Mark Up Language – somewhat like a special version of HTML exclusive to Facebook, but now they’re phasing it out. As such you can put together a custom page, with iFrames for example, using HTML , CSS, Javascript etc, allowing much greater variety in the complexity of what you can create, the limit is your imagination and the space requirements!

So now you’ve got your custom tab, set to be your default landing page, you’ve successfully navigated any newcomers to something (hopefully) interesting looking at least, now how to keep them there?

• Applications: Thanks to the Facebook Developer group, there are 1000’s of applications on the Facebook platform, many of which can be directly integrated with your page with little tech know how.
  

• Conversation: The days of a one way conversation between business and client are gone, engagement is important! Let people see that you are attentive, willing to answer and ask questions in return; it all helps with promotion of your brand image.

• Content: Just like any other channel, whether it’s a blog or twitter, it’s important to provide interesting content to your audience to keep them coming back. Sharing content from blogs or Twitter posts, posting and tagging photos and generally interesting topics will encourage repeat visitors.

One other thing to note, the maximum size you can have your page profile image is 540 pixels high by 180 pixels wide, a lot of Facebook real estate! Take the time to put together a graphic for your Facebook Page’s profile image that sits within this ratio. Whilst this is great for having an eye catching presence at the top of every page, for example a flyer or advert style image, one downside is that sadly it won’t fit too easily within the small square thumbnails that Facebook uses for any comments you post, so that might be something worth taking into account when picking an arrangement for your avatar.

If you need help making the decision as to whether Facebook will benefit your brand, or you would like assistance in populating your Facebook page with compelling content, then go ahead and get in contact with Rocktime's Search Marketing team.


Author: Alice Cheetham