Optimising your Business for Facebook

More and more these days businesses are finding out about the benefits of setting up your business brand through Facebook. It has taken a good while for most modern day companies to come round to the thinking that social media network sites aren’t just a fad but it will definitely help promote online business.

A common misconception is that it’s hard to set up your business on Facebook, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has an extremely user friendly interface and even if you haven’t used it before it’ll only take a short period of time to get used to it.

Here are the simple steps you need to follow to set up a business page on Facebook:

• Sign up for a free account if you’re not already one of the 100’s of millions using Facebook.

• On the left hand side bar of your user profile you will see one of the options is to ‘Add a Page’. You will be asked to specify the type of page you require.
Select the Business page option and fill in the required fields such as name and location.

• Now is the time to get your business page looking the part to best represent your business. Facebook provide a checklist of recommended options to get you started. Run through all these as best you can loading a business logo for your profile and linking your page to your website, blog and twitter if you have them. The integration of multiple platforms within the social media sphere is very useful so for example when you make new posts from your new Facebook page, automatic posts will be posted on say your Twitter account. This will maximise your online coverage and ensure more efficient online business promotion.

• A good hint for your profile image is to use the dimensions of 200x600px. This size is the maximum size Facebook will allow. Most people only use a small percentage of this. Make sure you all this space as it’s great advertising space for your services and products. Page space is seen as page real estate. The more you’ve got the better.

• Make sure you fill in all your tabs at the top of your profile, info, links and add a couple of posts on your wall to get you started linking back to your website, blog etc.

• It is possible to add additional tabs at the top of your profile which is extremely useful and good for expressing your business brand. For this you will need to add an application to your page called ‘StaticFBML’. Search for this in the search bar and go to the link. On the ‘StaticFBML’ page there is an option on the left hand bar to ‘Add to my page’ use this.

Now return to your page, you now have an additional tab called ‘StaticFBML’ by using edit page option you will be able change the tab’s name to something like ‘Welcome’. StaticFBML allows you to use HTML code to create a fully functional website within this space. For this example I am simply going to create an image by 500x700 and use this as a welcome image. Upload the image onto a folder on your website, blog or similar so you can have a url address pointing to it.

The code for the FBML box is as follows:

• On the profile edit options you are able to specify that visitors to your page will land on your preferred tab. For maximum effect change this to your welcome tab and as soon as a visitor lands on your business page you will have a full page spread promoting your business, your full length profile and welcome screen.