5 Easy Ways To Customize Your Facebook Fan Page
UPDATE April 1, 2012 – Facebook has changed the format of fanpages to timeline. While some of the steps in this post are still relevant, to see the latest on fan pages for health coaches, check out this post.
Facebook has taken off like a rocket over the past few years and by now every business knows they need to have a fan page presence. I see lots of new businesses make a fan page and just assume that the visitors are going to start showing up. This is a lot like building a website, there is more to it than “build it and they will come”. There are lots of tricks in Facebook on how to customize Facebook fan page designs so that you attract more visitors and when they do show up, they actually like your page, interact and hopefully join your email list. Just getting a fan on Facebook is not as valuable now as it used to be. With so many businesses on Facebook now, it is easy to get lost in the crowd.
I am going to go over 5 easy ways to customize your fan page. Actually setting up the page in the first place is very easy, just go to https://www.facebook.com/pages and click on “create page”.
5 Easy Ways To Customize Your Facebook Fan Page
1. Utilize the Facebook Banner Picture
By default, the picture on your fan page will just be a thumbnail. Facebook allows you to put in an image up to 180 x 520 pixels, so make sure your Facebook banner picture uses all of this real estate.
A simple photo editing software like GIMP or SumoPaint will allow you to easily create an attractive banner. You can put your photo, business banner, services, or anything you want in here. Just make sure that you edit the thumbnail that Facebook uses when sharing links from your page, this will be a small part of your banner, either your photo or logo is a good choice.
2. Link Your Fan Page To Your Personal Profile
This is one way people will find your fan page. After your fan page is up, edit your personal profile and go to Education and Work. Start typing in the name of your fan page and it should show up in the drop down menu. Choose this and this will link to the top of your personal profile.
By default, if you do this before your have your fan page up, Facebook creates a “community page” for the business and you will have no control over this. If you already did this, just go ahead and add your current fan page as your most recent employment.
3. Customize Your Facebook Fan Page Tab
This is one that lots of people don’t do. By default, Facebook will send all new visitors to your wall. Just like sending them to your website, you need to have some sort of compelling offer for your visitors so that they will want to connect with you. This can be a newsletter, video, e-book, you can use the same opt-in offer that you use on your website. As you can see on my page I created a custom tab called “Welcome” where all new visitors to my website land when they first visit my site.
To set this as the default landing tab, go to edit page, manage permissions, Default Landing Tab and choose your custom landing tab. Lujure is a good site to do this, they let you setup 1 fan page tab for free, any more than that is a paid service. There are lots of different ways to do this, depending on how technically inclined you are.
Some plugins also give you the option to “Fan-Gate” this page, meaning that before someone likes your page they will see one thing and after they like it another. This would be very useful if you are giving something away like a free e-book to download, they would need to become a fan before receiving the download.
4. Use The Photo Strip At The Top Of Your Fan Page
You can also take advantage of the 5 pictures at the top of your fan page to showcase yourself and your services.
Each of these pictures are linked to a photo where you can write some text and point your visitors to link connecting them to your services. The picture here can be a template of the dimensions you would need to make sure the right image shows up in the photo strip.
You can use this to link to other social media sites, to your website or any program or service offering that you have.
5. Use An Opt-In Form On Your Fan Page
Having Facebook fans is wonderful, but it is easy to loose track of people with so many competing voices continually going. The most important thing you can do on your fan page is to collect contact information from people who would like to learn more about you and what you do. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to incorporate this into the custom landing tab.
There you have it, 5 Easy Ways To Customize Your Facebook Fan Page. Another key to social media is to provide valuable content and interaction. People do not come to facebook to be “sold”. They want connection. It’s fine to talk about the services you provide and the work that you do but if all you do is sell on social media, you will find lots of people Un-Liking your page.
Make sure to check out my Facebook Fan Page where I am usually trying out new stuff on my fan page.
By Geoff Young
