Facebook Pages: More Reasons Your Business Needs One

Facebook has become wildly popular, with an estimated 500 million users and growing. With over 50% of those users logging on daily, spending 700 billion minutes per month, you cannot ignore Facebook as a unique and powerful marketing tool. Of course you want a business presence on Facebook, but you need to set up and use your pages effectively.

Facebook pages allow you to reach more prospects and interact with them in powerful ways without ever leaving the Facebook site. You can set them up to not just brand and promote your business, you can even enable them to purchase within the interface. If that isn’t reason enough to create a page, here are three more.

Like Button Widgets

One of the significant new features implemented in the last year are the embeddable Like buttons. You can now put Facebook like buttons on your own website. When  a visitor to your website clicks on the like button on your page, it shows up in their newsfeed that they liked it along with the link back to your website. Savvy marketers know that friend recommendations are a cornerstone to new business.

Profiles do not offer the means to embed a Like button and other Open Graph plugins into your own web site, so you must have a business page in order to use this vital feature.

Page Analytics

With the new Facebook Insights feature, you can view all kinds of useful data about your user activity on your page, including

how many likes and comments you received each day, demographic break-downs and much more. This data can be really useful for understanding the characteristics of your customer base, and knowing which wall posts get the best reaction.

This data is not available to individual profiles.

Facebook Plugins and Applications

To further engage your users, you can plug in and customize apps without a lot of technical know-how.

Although many Facebook apps are built for casual use, like the games and quizzes you may see your friends using in their personal feeds, there are quite a few apps that are ideal for a business Fan Page. These are useful for customizing your page with greater detail, showcasing your content from other social sites and getting more information from your customers.

Applications to consider adding are promotions, contests, polls, and YouTube for Pages.

Customize Your Pages

I hope I’ve convinced you that now is the time to set up your pages in Facebook. However, to stop there would be not utilizing them to their full potential. To really beef up their functionality you want add customized tabs to your page.

We’ve just released a tutorial video on how to create custom tabs on a page through the static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application. This requires a bit of html knowledge, but if you have that then this is a piece of cake. The catch is that Facebook will no longer allow us to develop this type of tab after 2010, although existing tabs will be supported, so you’d better jump on this right now.

You’ll still be able to develop custom tabs within an iframe using Facebook SKD JavaScript and Social Plugins, but that will require more programming skill, so if you know enough html to build a simple page, FBML is your current best option. If you already have a web page, you may want to port over the html from a page on your website and alter it slightly to work withing a Facebook static FBML tab.

To learn more about creating your own custom FBML tabs on a page, check out our FBML Made Easy video tutorial.

One thing you can count on for sure is that Facebook will continue to evolve and improve in 2011. There are already more than one million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries using Facebook. You should be among them.