6 Strategies to Build Fans on Your Facebook Page

Social networks are growing at an explosive rate. Just take a look at Facebook’s growth:

• More than 300 million active users
• 50% of active users log on in any given day
• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
• More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day

If you’re not promoting your business on Facebook, have no fear. It’s easy to get started and maintain. Setting up a personal profile and finding your friends is the first step to making a presence. However, promoting your business requires a second step – establishing a fan page. To get started, look for the menu bar in the lower left hand corner of your personal profile and click on the small blue and grey icon with the letter “f” on it. From there, you can create your business fan page quite easily. Many articles are available to assist in creating your page, and editing is quite simple. Just make sure to publish your page early on, so your work will be saved.

Building your fan base can be a bit tricky because you cannot “friend” someone like you can on your personal profile. On the contrary, people ELECT to become fans of their page. Your job is to make sure they know about it. You’ve got to spread the word on a consistent basis to introduce people to your Page and to your company. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Place a Fan Box widget on your website or blog, making it easy for your visitors to become fans with one click. You will find this widget in your fan page in the upper left corner (see diagram below) and follow the Facebook prompts to receive your code:

• Post a Facebook icon on your website, preceding it with text such as "Become a Facebook fan"
• Post a message on your blog about your Facebook fan page, and provide a link to your fan page in your post to your fan page.
  
• Ask your Facebook friends to become fans, but please be careful not to spam them.
  
• Promote your page within Facebook with a Facebook ad. Familiarize yourself with the Facebook guidelines for advertising fan pages. Facebook allows you to carefully target your ad's placement throughout the site so the right fans will find you.
  
• Post keyword-rich content on your Facebook page so your page will be found quickly within the site.

Facebook also offers guidelines for promoting your business page externally, including an icon and a code-generating widget for a unique badge. Visit their help section for fan pages to get the icons, badges, and details.

Facebook is where consumers are, and you need to be there if you want to be found!