Creating and Promoting a Facebook Page

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There are currently over 400 million active users on Facebook, which is somewhat insane. Last month Facebook became my 4th largest traffic source (admittedly it is ‘currently’ quite away behind the top 3). Before reading on I suggest becoming a fan here so you can see what I’m writing about.

I’ve always been a huge fan of building lists and subscribers to my various sites, it removes some of the reliance on search engines and gives you a bit more stability. Using my site coolest gadgets as an example we currently have around ~69K RSS and 10K email subscribers. When speaking to people outside of the industry, only a small percentage know what RSS actually is never mind using it, however even my technophobic father has heard of Facebook, so around 9 months ago I started looking at building a list on Facebook.

Creating a FaceBook Page
Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, go here, click “Create Page” and follow then follow the simple wizard. You’ll need to create a logo, add links in to your site and write a simple description but nothing too challenging. Next up we need to populate your page, you can either make daily posts yourself, pay somebody to do it or if your site has an RSS feed you can automate.

I’m currently using RSS Graffitti (thank you Zath, Clarke and Keith for the recommendation). This will automatically post a thumbnail and excerpt on your pages wall whenever a new post is published on your site. This will then link to the relevent page on your site, like so
graffitti example
You now have a fully automated page and source of traffic on one of the most popular sites on the web, cool.

Promoting Your Fan Page
The first thing you need to do is get 25 fans so that you can claim your vanity URL, I’d suggest manually mailing friends to become a fan, explaining why and personalise your messages a bit. Once you have 25 fans head here and claim a more human friendly URL for your fan page.

I’ve tried a few different methods promoting Coolest Gadgets fan page, the following graph shows how it’s grown since inception
allfans

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1 - Did a blog post saying we are now on Facebook
2 - LG kindly donated a LCD TV as a competition prize, to enter the contest readers had to become a fan or tweet about it (hence promoting the competition more).
3 - Did another blog post about the contest, this time keeping it really simple: Fan on Facebook? Then Stand A Chance to Win 42″ LG LCD TV
4 - We announced the winner
5 - The site was redesigned with much more prominence on becoming a facebook fan, including a banner advertising the page and a widget showing current fans (see right).

If you have the funds you can also promote the page using Facebook ads, as you can target based on peoples interests this can be highly effective.

My aim is to build the fan base up to 6,000+ by Christmas and promote various offers and discounts when available. If you’re not a fan (or friend) yet feel free to add me.

If you don’t have a fan page yet I’d suggest investing an hour of your time and creating yourself a new traffic source, let us know if you do and we’ll link them from here.

About Al Carlton

Al quit the 9 to 5 rat race in January of 2007, before then he was a software engineer and systems architect of financial system. Nowadays Al spends the days running his various businesses and experimenting with different ideas and opportunities.
Al can be found on twitter at AlCarlton.

Comments

  1. Just ‘liked’ three Facebook pages from people on here. My FB feed is going to look a bit odd to my friends!

  2. I have managed to accrue just under 200 fans since May as a result of reading this post and setting up a page.
    I think it son 192 or something so not too bad!
    I am doing some back-linking to the actual page now to see if I can get it to rank - that way all the rss posts may pass some link juice back to my site.
    I get quite a few click throughs when I post a new property and the traffic is as targeted as it gets as they have all opted in so seems to be working well so far!

  3. Hi
    I was just wondering. I have been struggeling with getting goof traffic to my developed sites. Now you say you buld you fanpage of ~2000 people by giving away a free tv. How does that related to the 2000 people that are onlky on you facebook page and might not even visit your reak site regularly. There has to be a positive payout i guess, but I am really confused on how to evaluate these fanpages etc.

    • You’re not trying to promote that bagel toaster site are you? I think it’s a bit too much of a micro-niche for facebook pages, plus there’s no pictures anywhere on the site and some of the text doesn’t make a lot of sense due to bad grammer etc.

  4. I should really look at investing some money and time into Facebook. It seems like a really powerful way to create brand awareness.

  5. Hello!

    At the moment the visits from Facebook are around the 60% New Visitor level. I only made the change a few days ago that forces them to visit the site to read the full article but I’ll know more over time.

    I’d expect there will be some readers that subscribe via multiple methods but I expect the majority will use their preferred reading method as it’s pretty pointless subscribing to the same content in different clients.

    Regards,
    Sandra

  6. Believe it or not I have never gotten to 25 fans on any of my profiles so I never got the nifty url. I will give you idea a try to email friends and family to add me as a fan. Thanks for the tips Al.

  7. Would love an update on this mate… hows the traffic/seo from Facebook coming

  8. I still cant get this to work! seriously just cant get it over 300 followers woot.

  9. The difference between step 1 and 5 is very interesting and anyone that is surprise by it shouldn’t be.

    There’s two reasons why what might seem like the same thing had different results.

    - Ease of use
    - Continued exposure

    So he got almost as many fans as the contest produced,
    just from cross promotion.

  10. Great post. I have just created a fan page for my lego site and currently have 20 fans, so only 5 to go before I can have a nicer url.

    For anyone that wants to trade fans - my fan page is http://www.facebook.com/pages/Little-Coloured-Bricks/141924345849184#!/pages/Little-Coloured-Bricks/141924345849184

  11. This post was totally helpful Al :)
    I created page for NinePlanets http://www.facebook.com/pages/Nine-Planets/124974757563139

  12. At the moment the visits from Facebook are around the 60% New Visitor level. I only made the change a few days ago that forces them to visit the site to read the full article but I’ll know more over time.
    I’d expect there will be some readers that subscribe via multiple methods but I expect the majority will use their preferred reading method as it’s pretty pointless subscribing to the same content in different clients.
    Regards,
    Sandra

  13. Victor@Your college loans online says:

    How are you coming on your 5,000 fans before Christmas.? I am currently working on building up my brand before I venture into Facebook land. I have a personal site but not a business one. I think having the competition is a great idea and also a great way to give back to your readers.

  14. Just gor past the name claim stage for tanks.net page: http://www.facebook.com/armytanks

  15. I still can’t monetize my fanpage, although i didnt even try with affiliate links yet, just with links to my etsy and to my blog. I have some 2300 fans now and around 450 impressions when i make updates. Maybe i need more impressions? And what would you recommend as far as affiliates go, Clickbank, CJ or something else? PLs visit if you have time :) http://www.facebook.com/CharmingBdz

  16. Selina, it is very difficult I agree. I think Facebook is not totally geared towards buying stuff, though that’s not to say it’s impossible but I think you’d need loads more fans and regular visitors/interactors.

    CJ costs a fortune to get in for sellers, and I’m not sure about clickbank for jewellery.

    It might be good if you run a competition from facebook on your blog to win an item of jewellery now and again, to get people going to your blog via facebook. For example you could make a blog post about a romantic gift prize and ask people to reply with their romantic stories involving jewellery or gifts and you pick the best one and send them the prize. This gets people coming to your site and adding content for you, plus the odd runner up might buy something anyway?

    I would consider setting up a proper site of your own at some point though, on your own domain name, to build your own brand identity - and so people can remember the address so they can tell other people face to face. charmingbeadz.blogspot.com is quite hard to remember, especially if you never heard of blogspot (believe me, many people have not - especially people new to the internet), and etsy.com/shop/CharmingBeadz is practically impossible to remember off the top of your head.

    The products themselves look very beautiful, so there must be a market out there for them.

  17. i am using facebook ads to promote my page but not getting the results back on the investment
    i am surely going to try your tips now
    thanks a ton

  18. wow up to 11k “likes”
    I suppose that would mean you hit your christmas goal?

  19. Also not only does this reduce your reliance on SEs.
    But these days its becoming increasingly important for organic ranking anyway.
    So “killing two birds”.

  20. Personally I think FB is going to be a more powerful SEO tool in the future, at the moment google is not saying much but bet you bottom dollar, they are looking. I set up an FB AD page and it has attracted a lot of like, 327 but traffic is not that great.

  21. I am building Facebook fan pages for majority of my websites to get those initial 25 fans to claim your url I often use micro outsourcing sites like Amazon MTurk, just pay somebody like 1 cent for becoming fan of your page because I have a lot of pages my friends would hate me if I ask them to like all of my pages :)

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