In my last post on how to create a Facebook page, I mentioned that Facebook allows you to create a custom landing tab for your business’ page. This provides you with the opportunity to deliver a personalised welcome message to new visitors, highlight any current special offers you may have, and reinforce your branding.

Creating a custom tab is easy – as long as you know some basic HTML and CSS. While you can also include Facebook’s own markup language, FBML, to add extra functionality to your tab, this is neither required nor, in many cases, needed. Landing tabs designed using only HTML and CSS can be as simple or complex as you want.

Teaching the basics of HTML and CSS (not to mention FBML) are beyond the scope of this blog, I’m afraid (that’s a whole ‘nother blog entirely!). If you’d like to delve into the world of HTML and CSS, I’d recommend visiting W3Schools for their straightforward free tutorials. And you can find a reference to FBML at Facebook’s Developers’ Wiki.

Once you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS, here are the steps to follow to create a custom landing tab for your Facebook page:

Step 1: Add the Static FBML application to your page

Go to your Facebook page, and click on the link at the top left (under the picture) that says “Edit page”. Scroll down the list of applications to the very bottom, where there’s a box that says “More applications”. Click on the pencil icon to the right of this box and then click on “Browse more”.

Type “Static FBML” (without the quote marks) into the search box to the top left of the “All applications” page.

Follow the Static FBML search result link to the application’s page. Here, click on the link to the top left (under the picture) that says “Add to my page”. When you do this, you’ll be presented with a list of the pages for which you are the administrator (it may just be one!) and confirm which page you want to add the application to by clicking on “Add to page”.

Step 2: Open up the editing area for the Static FBML

Return to your Facebook page and again click on the “Edit this page” link in the top left. Scroll down the list of applications to find the newly installed Static FBML application. Click on the pencil icon to the right of this box, and click on the “Edit this application” option in the drop down list.

Step 3: Title your tab

Enter the name of your tab into title field of the tab editing area. This can be anything you choose, from “Welcome” to “Special Offers”, “About Us”, or even “Competition” if you have one on the go!

Step 4: Add the tab content

It’s at this point that you get to use your HTML and CSS skills to create a design for your tab that is as serene or as fancy as you wish. My only recommendation here is that you stay true to your branding, and mimic the look and feel of your website to ensure consistency in your marketing message.

There is unfortunately no preview option when you’re editing your tab’s content. You will need to save your changes and click the link at the top of the page to return to your page and view your custom tab. My own solution to this was to open my Facebook page in a new window and refresh it each time I had made changes that I wanted to preview – it saved me some of the frustration that I would otherwise have encountered through endless to-ing and fro-ing!

Step 5: Making your Static FBML box a separate tab

After you’ve entered some content, saved the changes and returned to your page for a sneak preview, you may notice that your custom tab is sitting as a box on the “Boxes” tab rather than being a separate tab in its own right.

In order to change this, click on “Edit my page” and scroll down the list of applications to the Static FBML one. Click on the pencil icon and choose “Application settings” from the drop down menu. On the pop up screen, click on “remove” in the brackets next to where it says “Box” and click on “add” in the brackets next to where it says “tab”. The settings will change to those illustrated in the image below, and your custom tab will be visible as a separate tab when you return to your page.

Step 6: Change your default landing tab for new visitors

Click on “Edit my page”. Under the second box (“Wall settings”), choose the name of your new tab from the drop-down menu to set it as the default landing tab for any new visitors to your page.

Step 7 (optional): Change the order of your tabs

If you want to move your newly created custom tab to another position, simply click on it and drag it (while holding the mouse button down) to where you want to position it. The only limitation here is that the wall and info tabs are set in positions one and two and this cannot be changed.

Please use the comment section below to ask any questions you may have (or contact me by email). And once you’ve set up your page and your custom tab, please share it in the comments below – I’d love to see what you’re up to and become a fan of your business!

Lastly, please visit our Facebook page – we look forward to welcoming you to our Facebook space!

Step 1: Find the Facebook link to create a page

Yup, this is one of those funnies I mentioned! Given that you have to have a Facebook account to create a page for your business, I would think that a logical place to put a link to create a page for your business would be on your Facebook profile itself. Unfortunately, Facebook’s logic and mine appear to differ in this regard!

Instead, you have the following options when it comes to finding the place on Facebook where you can create a page:

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
2. Go to http://www.facebook.com. Underneath the sign-up area, click on the link that says “create a page for a celebrity, band or business”.

   

3. Go to Facebook’s Advertising section by scrolling to the very bottom of your profile, and either clicking on “Advertising” or the “Ads and Pages” button. Once at the Advertising section, click on the link at the top to create a page.

   

4. While visiting an already existing page, look for the “create a page for my business” link towards the bottom of the left sidebar.

   

Step 2: Name your Facebook page and select a category

Warning! Warning! This step requires some careful thought, as this is the only information that cannot be changed at a later stage. The only way to change anything you select here is to delete your page and start from scratch – a minor annoyance if you make a mistake in the initial set-up before you have fans, but a big deal if you decide you want something different a few months down the line when your page is well and truly established.

For a small business, click on “Brand, product or organization” and choose the most appropriate category form the drop-down menu.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked to enter the name of your page. Here, many people make the mistake of entering a description of their business rather than the actual business name. While a description does tell people what you do, this dilutes your branding. It also prevents you from changing your initial Facebook messy page url to a much more clean vanity one as soon as your page has more than 100 fans.

When you’re done entering the information, type your name into the “digital signature” box and tick the box that asks you to confirm that you have the right to create a page for the business concerned. Then, click on the “Create page” button, and… voila! You have a Facebook page!

Step 3: Add information to your page

At this stage, you have a Facebook page, but it hasn’t yet been published to the outside world yet. Before you can do this, you need to add information about your business to the page.

There are three important things to do here:

1. Add a picture: If you have a business logo, use this as the picture on your page. You may also choose to use a picture of yourself here, if you are strongly identified with the business brand.
2. Edit the information that will be displayed on the “Info” tab: Click on the link at the top right of the tab to add the information required. This information can be added to or changed at a later stage.
3. Add some information to the “About” box: This box is found underneath the picture, and provides a quick snapshot of your business. You can use this box for your tagline, or to provide a quick summary of your business, or to highlight important keywords related to the products or services you offer.

Step 4: Choose a landing tab for your page

Facebook gives you the option to choose which tab new visitors to your page will see. The default setting is the wall tab, but it can often be confusing for new visitors to find themselves in the middle of a conversation without some sort of introduction to your business first.

As a result, it’s recommended that you direct new visitors to another tab – initially, you may want to use the “Info” tab for this purpose so that new visitors receive an overview, but you can change this at a later stage to a fully customised tab using HTML and Facebook’s own mark-up language, FBML.

This level of customisation is more complex – if you have a good knowledge of basic HTML, you may want to design such a page yourself; alternatively, contact a designer (like us here at Phenomenoodle, for example!), who can put together a custom landing tab for you.

To change the landing tab for new visitors to the “Info” tab, click on “Edit page” under your page picture, and click on the pencil image to the right of the “Wall settings” section to edit your preferences here.

Step 5: Publish your page

Once you have your page set up as you’d like it, publish the page (link on the top right of the editing page – see the image above) to make it visible to others on Facebook and the search engines.

Step 6: Become a fan of your own business

The first fan of your business is a very important person: you! Click on the link at the top of the page to add yourself as a fan. This action will appear in your personal profile news feed and be visible to your friends – an excellent way to alert people to the existence of your page.

Step 7: Invite friends to become fans of your page

Once you’ve published your page, another option is added to the menu below the picture: “suggest to friends”. Clicking on this option allows you to select which Facebook friends you’d like to send an invitation to to join your page. You can also use the “share” button at the bottom of the page to send a message to specific friends or to publish a message about your new page to your personal profile.

And there you have it – the basics of creating a Facebook page for your business!

Please use the comment section below to ask any questions you may have (or contact me by email). And once you’ve set up your page, please share it in the comments below – I’d love to see what you’re up to and become a fan of your business!

Lastly, please visit our Facebook page – it’s newly set up and will be receiving more customisation over the coming few weeks to make it look a bit prettier, but if you’d like to get in at the beginning to be able to say you knew us when, become a fan of Phenomenoodle on Facebook today!

Catching up with friends, old and new? Oohing-and-aahing over photos of their [babies/puppies/drunken exploits – insert as appropriate, depending on the friend concerned]?

How about building a business?

With over 250 million active users on Facebook, it’s not only a given that your potential customers are online, but also highly likely that they’re a member of this social networking site.

And, in the same way that Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with your friends, you can use the site to connect with customers.

You do this by creating a Facebook page for your business

A Facebook page is similar in many respects to a personal profile. However, a page has been designed specifically to give brands of various kinds – businesses, charities, bands, celebrities, politicians – a presence on Facebook.

A Facebook presence can help your business succeed

1. It allows you to engage with your community of customers

In Facebook parlance, each person that joins your page is a fan. Yes, you too can be a rock star – of your niche, that is!

But unlike some aloof rock stars, you can use your Facebook page to interact directly with your fans, build a strong community and receive feedback on your products or services. The way in which pages are set up promotes this – you and your fans can do things like post to your wall or the discussion board, you can upload pictures or videos, or invite fans to events.

Every time you update your page in one these ways, your fans receive notification of this in their Facebook news feeds. Think of a Facebook page as another way to engage with people who have shown an interest in your business, like an alternative to an email list or list of subscribers to your blog.

An advantage of building a popuar Facebook page over email lists and blog subscribers, however, is the fact that Facebook provides you with aggregated demographic information related to your fans, given that this information is in their database already. This doesn’t mean that you have access to the private details of all your fans, just that Facebook will tell you things like what percentage of your fans are male or female, what age ranges they fall into and where they’re located. This is information that can be used to understand your fans and to target product or service offerings accordingly.

As an extension of this, Facebook has also recently introduced the ability to target fans based on their birthdays. This means so much more than just wishing fans a happy birthday – you could send them a gift from your business, such as a voucher that they can redeem on your website, for example.

2. It builds your brand

As with personal user profiles, Facebook pages make use of a tabbed structure. These tabs are highly customisable, which means that you can use HTML together with Facebook’s own markup language (FBML) to create distinctive content that matches your brand identity.

A good use of this feature is the ability to create custom landing pages. Rather than having people new to your business land in the middle of a confusing wall of posts, you can use this feature to direct them to a customised welcome page that explains your business clearly.

Every time one of your fans takes action related to your page – joins your page in the first place, posts to your wall, adds to your discussion board – this shows up in their news feed and is visible to all their friends, who may in turn be tempted to visit you page and become a fan themselves. As a result, a Facebook page provides the potential for your brand to develop a large viral following.

While Facebook pages can be used to drive traffic back to your website, they also offer the possibility of engaging people directly. This is because Facebook’s pages also allow for integration of content that you would normally put on your website, such as newsletter sign-ups or ebook downloads. Used in conjunction with your business website, a Facebook page can therefore become a very profitable business tool.

3. It has benefits related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Pages profit from the high standing of Facebook itself on the Internet – Facebook’s high volume of traffic, plus its high ranking, means that the page that you create for your business will get indexed quickly by the search engines. This ensures that it is visible not only to users within Facebook, but to the rest of the world wide web too, thereby ensuring that your business is found easily by your customers.

Next steps

This post has detailed the why of setting up a Facebook page for your business. My next post will provide the how.

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And please visit our Facebook page – it’s newly set up and will be receiving more customisation over the coming few weeks to make it look a bit prettier, but if you’d like to get in at the beginning to be able to say you knew us when, become a fan of Phenomenoodle on Facebook today!