Woe, oh woe, is me; I just put up a business page in Facebook. It may be easy for some, but it was an effort to me.
Part 1 was the easiest part. You just use the Facebook tools to create a business page. This is Part 2 of the account for the trials and tribulations. The discussion here is about selecting special "tabs" and selecting content in them for a business page in Facebook. While this section is highlighting business pages, much of the apps discussed will apply to any personal page too.
Additional edit: Here is a summary of the stories in this thread:
- 111008 - Announcing and linking options for your Facebook page-Part 4
- 111006 - Installing three Facebook content tabs, step-by-step- Part 3
- 111005 - Selecting Facebook welcome and other tabs- Part 2
- 111004 - Putting up a Facebook business page- Part 1
Having your page come up under the Facebook defaults does not allow you to tell people much about your business. If you do this, your visitors are pretty much limited to viewing your information tab, and seeing your news feed. That is not very satisfying. The local business info page has you put business hours and the physical location information, but that does not apply to many home based or other businesses, and is still very limited. What you need is content. People usually come to a site for content. Your news feed is pretty much a series of little teasers to that content, and your businesses activities that people may find interesting. When they come to your site and look at your news feed, it is like a party line voice mail. You have little control of what others actually peek in to listen to, if they visit it at all.
Entering content
To enter content beyond the basics, you will need to add some apps. These apps are Facebook oriented program bots that allow you to add content, and generate a "tab" to link the page navigation to the content. Facebook installs a few they think you may be interested in when they install the page. But I am looking for more.
The most commonly used app used is a welcome page. Everyone that enters a business should be greeted. The welcome page can serve as that greeter. The others tabs are dependent upon what else you want to do.
On the Internet, it is often said that "Content is king." I agree with this. I rarely go to a website to get a sales pitch. I go to find out information, and based upon that information I make choices. Those choices determine if I return for the sales pitch.
Marketing plan
Before going to this next step of content and enter it, it is time to determine what your business page objectives are.
The content will need to follow your marketing plan. Some questions for the page content include:
- who are you making it for,
- who do you expect to see it first,
- who do you expect to make a follow up visit,
- what do you want each of them to know about your business,
- what will they do once they arrive,
- how will you get them to keep in contact with you, and
- converting the visits into business returns.
- I will not be trying to play a "numbers game" to just get "likes" (fans). I have worked with websites since about 1996. I have played the numbers game and seen the scams, issues, and problems related to going that direction. Thus, it is my opinion that the often declared objective to get large numbers of viewers is not particularly effective for most businesses. My main reasons for that are:
- Having a large number of viewers in a day creates server traffic problems. This causes expense for the site owner. Your Facebook page is subject to the whims of that company and if they don't think the traffic is legitimate, and profitable to them, they will dump it. Their terms of service (TOS) tells you this, so you were warned when you signed up.
- If it is not an interest related to genuine content interests in your business., having a million fans is not necessarily profitable to you, or anyone else. A fan base of less than 100 can be profitable, if they are active in your business endeavors. Facebook recognizes this displays a count for both these metrics.
- People are turned off by sites that push just being "liked." When I go to a site that has a big graphic to like them, I usually jump off the page as it shows they are more interested in my adding to their count than getting to know my consumer needs, or feeding me some content that interests me. Worse yet is the one that you click like and once you do it, they shove you into a contest, sign up, or apparent scam. For most of us, that will get them "unliked" quick.
- Facebook is a socialization site. Unless the company is large, a large number of likes means that the site owners are unlikely to be able to pay attention to my needs, should I decide to work with them. If I am not that big of a company, fan posts to me will get missed in the "chaff" that is occurring. That means I am missing on socializing opportunities. The obvious biggest downside is that my business will not grow, because I will not convert anyone to a client.
- Thus, a small number of genuine clients, suppliers, and associates can be more valuable than a large number of people that just "liked" the page or follow it without interacting with your social efforts.
- I will be attempting to show expertise and examples of work. That means:
- I need to understand the process involved in installing and using tab apps, in addition to obtaining their results. Thus I will need to go through the process step-by-step.
- While generating likes is not the mission, a large number of likes that are legitimate is beneficial. Someone who likes your page is considered a fan in Facebook. A fan can want to follow your page for many reasons. Examples are:
- for a band- where are you playing,
- for a consultant - what is your latest expertise sharing effort,
- for a writer - where is your latest work located,
- for a storefront, the weekly circular or coupon. Note that I do not want daily updates of offers for the day. I do not shop everyday and, with gas prices as high as they are I am not likely to start.
- As a consultant and writer, I have a blog showing some of my expertise, articles, and other activities related to the services of the business. This is one feature I will want to display in acontent tab.
- I also have an array of examples scattered on the web that could be viewed. Since some of these do not stay published or move around on a third party site, I will avoid the problem of continuous edits and potential broken links by pointing to stable locations (URLs) as much as possible.
- I will be showing a brief statement of the available qualifications and expertise.
- In time I may like to add more, so any plan needs to be flexible.
The search for an app
The next issue is to find the apps to let me put that content on the site. This is where I had the most problems. A search of Facebook just gave me app names with no information of how well it worked. Facebook did not help me much in my search. It helped at the end point, but I determined that the beginning point needed to start elsewhere. In my review just before writing this I noticed Facebook was much more helpful. So they are changing all the time.
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| What the tab links can look like |
My first thought was to find Facebook business pages that had an app that I thought worked well, and find out what app the page owner was using. After many attempts, including contacts with some of the page owners, I failed to obtain a single worthwhile recommendation. Most page owners had apparently hired someone to do it and had no clue what I was taking about. Once they had the page tab features completed, they ended the designer relationship. They did not know how to change the content, or how it actually got there. Apparently, most Facebook page owners are not highly technically knowledgeable. Most created their business page themselves and stopped when they ran out of Facebook supplied options. Some page owners did not reply at all. Either they were ignoring contacts, or refusing to take the time to share with another Facebook user who was not directly asking about their business products or services. It can be hard to find the link you used again, even after you have selected an app. I don't think Facebook makes it easy to do this, and the Facebook standards for the app my not be followed by the app maker you selected.
Networking sites
My next step was to try and gain feedback from Linkedin and other network sites where I have a presence. I got much more response and results from this. Some only wanted to sell me their service and would not share how to do it. I understand that, but one of my objectives was to learn how it worked. Having someone else do it would not do that. Plus, as I discussed in Part 1, programmers often put together a site that is what a programmer thinks is cool, but is not business friendly. I needed to learn enough to guide the programmer, or hire a consultant to do it for me. Since learning was a goal for me, buying these service were not an option.
Others were willing to share, but did not know enough of the answers to give best guidance. Since I only program as a part of my activities, and do not keep up with it like a programmer does, most of the network resources I had available to me did not tell me enough about the details of the programs involved, advantages and disadvantages of each option, and how to perform the tasks.
Google search to the rescue
Once my direct and networking knowledge attempts failed to meet my objectives, I turned to Google and made searches for articles about Facebook apps. A search of Google gave me ideas, but some of those recommendations were not optimal, and some others led me astray into bad problems. I decided that I would use a different app for each content tab I planned to make. This would let me determine the advantages and disadvantages for each one, give me some expertise, and would assure that if one tab failed the others would, hopefully, remain working.
The bad
When you install an app you open your Facebook information to the app developer. In my opinion, it generates the potential for a huge security breach. If they do not misuse it, great, but what if they are a scammer. You have to trust the app developer with all your information, including your friend list. This is a potentially bad bug which appears to have bitten a lot of users.
One such app I encountered was welcome tab. It had a high recommendation by a well established author. Perhaps I got a malware clone by mistake. Facebook reported that it had 11 million users. What it did for me was refuse my content and put its own like button, contests, and other content in. They made it very hard to get rid of them too. I thought that the 11 million user count reported by Facebook indicated it was popular. I think it showed how many people made the mistake and could not get rid of it. I should have looked at the reviews before making the choice. It was filled with curses and complaints and the ranking appeared to reverse your actual vote. If you voted 1, it counted it as 4 and so on. The effect of that is that it made it appear that they had a nice ranking. I will show how I got rid of bad apps in Part 3, technical aspects and how to's for the selected apps. Within a week of my finding it, I could not find it again to show what it looked like. Perhaps Facebook caught them and killed their app. Most of the other bad apps I tried had disappeared within the week span of performing the tab content install activity, and time it took to write about the effort.
The ugly
Some content editors required you know programming. I selected and used one of them. It allowed me to fully control the content. It also reminded me how much I appreciate that the web advanced enough that html and other editors that take care of coding and give you a spell checker were developed. After doing it once I used my Dreamweaver to create the code, and then copy and pasted the correct html portions.
One app I tried had a nice discussion page, testimonials, nice ratings results shown, and looked like they would be a good choice. I installed the app and received a notice that it used another app to work that was $9.99 per month with my first 30-days being free. My immediate response was, "Wow, that is an ugly practice," and I promptly went through the removal process. While removed their app, I left myself subscribed to their business page, as they do share information about what things mean, even if they do conduct a "bait and switch" when you make the mistake of trying it with their tools.
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| Even though they are a good service, word of social had some problems during install - it is all fixed now |
You will usually need to maintain two versions for each page, the fan, and non-fan. The fan has visited and "liked" your page. The non-fan may have visited, but has not "liked" your business page. It seems inconsistent to me that Facebook tells you they do not want spam on their site and how they will kick you off if you do it, and then give you a programming flag for tools to do just that. However, I can see how it can work as a benefit. One of the apps I selected used the non-fan to tell you to install the app to make it work and why. Once you did it, the content changed to show how to obtain support for your installed app.
The good
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| URL of tabmaker |
The third content tab app I selected was Word of Social. This is the least technical as the edit activity is on the page site you request, and you do not have to go to the third party site, that is actually keeping the content, to make the edit (such as tab fusion makes you do). You can edit the html and put other script languages in it. However, when you go back into the html mode it may change your source code to what they think it should look like. They also do what the old html editors used to do. They will sometimes add code for you that will cause your page to not appear as you expect. They mean well, as they are trying to help. However, if you use the option to enter the source html code to change it, it can be very hard to find the offending code. (Note scams are rampant in Facebook apps. During this writing someone tried to pretend they were word of social so they could scam off their good name.) The actual url of the app I used is shown below.
 This is the actual link to the real app |
| url of word of social |
In review, putting up a tab for social content may be more than the typical business page owner would want to try on their own. I did not find it to be as easy as I thought I would. Considering I had an extensive history and knowledge about the Internet before I began, I can see how others might not want to make the attempt.
It is still not time to advertise it
There is still work to do before you announce your page. So I do not advise you to advertise or announce it until you read Part 4.
In Part 3, I will show the main steps to enter content into the three app tools I selected. If you are willing to make the attempt, I will try to show you how I did mine, and you can use the discussion to do it for your own.
Additional edit: Here is a summary of the stories in this thread:
- 111008 - Announcing and linking options for your Facebook page-Part 4
- 111006 - Installing three Facebook content tabs, step-by-step- Part 3
- 111005 - Selecting Facebook welcome and other tabs- Part 2
- 111004 - Putting up a Facebook business page- Part 1
Website: http://www.purepotential.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PurePotentialMusings
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