8 Steps Towards An Awesome Facebook Page

Facebook pages are increasingly (wow, that’s going to sounded like a dated statement in a few months) becoming a must-have for organizations, companies and non-profits. If you area launching a page, or have one and want to know how to clean it up, here are some simple steps to take.

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1. Crop Your Profile Photo Thumbnail – Adjust the thumbnail layout of your Facebook page image by cropping the thumbnail to include the entire logo. Friends of the people who “like” the your Facebook page will then be more likely to visit your page when reading the news stream. An example of a cropped and properly sized thumbnail is Gap’s Facebook page. Notice how both the image has significant real-estate, but the thumbnail also fits properly into the square proportions. Nice, huh?
2. Add Text to Your Page Photo – This isn’t a must-have, but can help direct users if you are launching a new campaign or product. You can add words (as an image) adjacent to your elongated page image.
3. Install the “Notes” App - By using the built-in “notes” app in Facebook, you can easily push content to your fans on a regular basis. You can include your organization’s blog and about every hour FB checks the feed to see if something is new. If there is something, a link and description is pushed to your feed. This can be win/win. Your fans get great content, and more visitors read your blog. I find this even better than having a dedicated RSS tab. The settings are a little buried, but are easy to setup.
4. Create a Landing Page - The Static FBML app is somethingFacebook created to allow users to put their own text in a and simple markup in a tab on your Facebook Page. I use it to embed a newsletter subscription block, but you can put most any text in it. It is a little technical to setup, but takes less then 5 minutes. Here is a basic video on how to install it.
5. Welcome Visitors – Now that you have a great landing page built with the FBML app, you need to set it as the default for visitors who haven’t yet “liked” your page. To do this, you click on “edit page” just like before, but now click on “manage permissions” and select the static fbml page that you just built as the “Default Landing Page”. See Mashable for an example of how they setup their page to encourage users to “like” them.
6. Connect to Twitter – I never post from Twitter myself, instead I connect Facebook with Twitter, so that all my postings and stories for my organization are automatically pushed to Twitter. This means I do half the work and grow my audience in two places. To do this, you just need to add in the Twitter app. You can either have Twitter update Facebook, or Facebook update Twitter (depending on your preferences). I prefer the latter.
7. Create Multiple Admins – You might want to create additional admins for your FB page so that the job of updating it doesn’t fall solely on one person. This is simple. You just need to login as the admin, search for your page, then click on “edit page” in the lower left (below profile). Following this, select “manage admins” and you can add in other user’s emails directly from this page.
8. Create a Call to Action – Lastly, now that the page is big and beautiful, ask your supports (though an email or “FB alert”) to suggest the page to two or five of their friends. This can help quickly grow your constituency, particularly if you’re providing valuable content to your fans. Maybe run some type of give-away to encourage your supports to promote you.

There you go. I hope this was a helpful post. If I missed any Facebook page tricks, please add a comment.