Image by GOIABA (Goiabarea)

A Facebook fan page is one of today’s important elements to include when mapping out a social media campaign. Facebook’s status as the most popular social networking site on the planet, with over 400 million active users and counting, sure speaks volumes, providing marketers a quick and easy way to reach and engage existing markets and reach potential new ones.

However, simply creating a fan page may not be enough especially with distractions like the multitude of apps and notes flocking Facebook. This makes it a bit of a challenge for your target audience to discover your presence; and even if they do find your page another wall you may have to face is to make them feel compelled to stay.

Serendipity on the social network is good but unreliable so to help, we’ve compiled a few simple ways to get your started in making your Facebook fan page a cinch for you to manage and easy to find for your target demographic.

Maximize Your Profile Pic
Facebook doesn’t really allow much freedom when it comes to customizing page layout. While this thankfully prevents users from turning it into glittering hot messes like most tween-owned MySpace profiles, it also limits you from optimizing every component to your advantage to match your corporate identity, for instance. Despite this, you can still leverage on your fan page’s real estate through your profile pic. Right now, Facebook recommends your profile pics to be within 200 pixels wide which is enough for your basic company logo. Height, however, is not explicitly specified, so we tested it out and it allowed us to use a banner-sized pic 600 pixels tall that would occupy most of the page’s left sidebar. At 200x600px, you can create far more versatile images that range from photo illustrations to image composites; just as we’ve done for a fictitious band you can see from the screenshot below.

Get a Vanity URL
When setting up a professional Web site for your brand you get a domain name that matches or includes the name of your business, the same should also apply with your online presence on Facebook. For fan pages with 100 or more fans, the social network allows you to get a vanity URL the same way it does with personal accounts. So instead of a long URL consisting of several levels of slashes and random numbers, you can get a www.facebook.com/brandname, for instance. This makes it easy on the eyes and it’s way easier to remember your page’s actual location which, of course, makes for an easier link distribution.


Backtrack to Facebook
One of the purposes of having a fan page is to direct traffic to your own Web site; this is quite easy since Facebook’s Info tab has a text field dedicated to your site’s URL/s. On the flipside, you should also let your site visitors know that you have a presence on Facebook which will offer them a place to discuss your brand and receive information from you in real-time.

For your own Web site’s visitors, it’s common to include a text or graphic link anywhere on the landing page that will direct them to your Facebook fan page. This also applies for any profile you have set up on Twitter, LinkedIn and various external blog services. On the other hand, you can also set up a customized URL from within your domain that will direct users to your Facebook page; something like www.yourwebsite.com/facebook or facebook.yourwebsite.com would be sufficient.

For a more engaging approach, you can create a Fan Box widgets on Facebook, inviting your visitors to become a fan of your brand. This is pretty easy since the social network will generate the code for you and all you have to do is copy and paste it on your site’s HTML code; the common spot would be along the sidebars.

Track Your Stats With Insights
Your Facebook fan page is basically your brand’s own headquarters within the social network, and as such, you should also monitor its progress. Unfortunately though, site traffic tracking services like Alexa won’t really help in this, so your best bet is Facebook’s own Insights tool. While it won’t supply you with the most comprehensive of information, it will, however, provide you with the essential data you will actually need.

At the onset, Facebook Insights gives you an overview of your fan page’s interactions on a weekly basis and the quality of your contents. It also offers specific figures in graphs such as the number of page views, fans, wall posts and the Likes they garnered. Moreover, if you also have embedded videos, photos and ongoing discussions, Facebook Insights will also display the number of times they have been viewed, the interactions within them and the age and gender breakdown of their viewers.

This gives you a glimpse of how effective it is for your campaign, how much it is contributing to brand awareness and news dissemination and will allow you to plan your next necessary step to make tweaks to make improvements. What’s more, you can also export data from Insights in either Excel or.html formats for later analysis.

Tags: community, Facebook, Social Media, social media marketing, Strategy, the right way