Building your company Facebook page and attracting Likes

Having a company Facebook page is all the rage this year.  Here are some tips on building a company Facebook page, from the basics through to a few slighlty more advanced steps. The basics are:

1.  Setting up a Company page (rather than a personal page, so you get Likes, not Friends).  Or it could be a relevant Community, School or education style page.  There are many types of pages, each with separate purposes so it's important to set up the correct page in the beginning so you don't lose your Fans later.  You can also choose your privacy settings as to whether this will be open to view for all, or open only to those to whom you give permission. 

Key tip: I recommend having your location as part of your page name.  Once you get more than 50 likes, you can't change your page name, and often there are other similarly named pages globally, making it hard for viewers to distinguish which is the local player.

2. Starting to post on your wall with chatty or exclusive content.  You can post links to interesting snippets on the web or videos. 

Tip: Try asking questions to elicit response, adding things like new menus if you're a restaurant, load some photo galleries, perhaps some sneak previews of upcoming product launches, and maybe a video or two.

3. Adding a "designed" profile picture for the top left, such as the one we did for Continental right. 

Tip: Size is important to get right here - too long and the submenu drops out of sight.  Too short and it's not very hip!  In addition, this picture gets used as a kind of dot point for your posts so consideration of how it looks as a dot point is also worth taking into consideration. Also if it's narrower than 200 pixels, it gets rejected by Facebook.

4. Adding a welcome landing page that has a promo and incentive to Like your page, or that looks cool and covers your key services, such as the one below right.  Having some kind of deal or discount for liking your page encourages Likes. 

Tip: Interestingly Facebook has just introduced a new ad policy that you can't have competition entry draws such as this one, where you are entered by simply liking a page.  You now have to enter on an external web site.

5. Building your following of Likes.  This is easier said than done.  Obvious steps are to make sure you add the Like button, or "Like us on Facebook" type icon on your web site and blog page.  Also include an incentive to like on your email newsletters.  There's also a plugin showing how many likes you have that can be put on your site.  You can also add your Facebook page link to your stationery. 

Tip: The best way we've found to build likes is to do a Facebook ad campaign. We're finding this considerably cheaper than Adwords at present.

6. Doing targetted Facebook ad campaigns (we've had considerable success recently for a pretty low outlay) to build your Likes.  You can target by region, by age, by age of children, by interest group, and set a budget that is affordable.

Tip: you can even target people who like a specific group or page that is your competitor.

7. Adding a You Tube video channel (you need 20 Likes to do this).  Salomon Freestyle have done this well.

8.  Adding discussion groups or polls, creating events (you can see who is coming, not sure, and can't make it).

Alexanders Internet Marketing helps with all of these steps.  Our designers and online marketers can help you to get it all rolling so please get in touch! We're happy to give you some feedback on your Facebook page, or on how to get started.

You may also be interested in our blog on Facebook company page versus web sites - where should you be concentrating your online profile.