It’s the Big IDEA, Week 14!

All right, then – have you been looking forward to this week? I know I have! I love Social Media because it helps us interact with our audience, our community – and it’s a great way to Engage with our online business community!

So, let’s review. Last week we talked about the Personal Profile side of Facebook. Did you get the opportunity to create those posts, add those photos, and find a few of your Friends in the Facebook world? You can even connect with famous people and with strategic individuals in your niche or business area through social networks. Finding these individuals is as simple as using the search bar at the top of Facebook which we discussed last week.

Hopefully you’ve taken the time to create a bit of engagement on your Personal Profile, because this week it’s time to establish our business presence. This is the second of two hats that we wear on Facebook or the two personas that we use while communicating with our audience. You’ll recall from last week that our audience in our Personal Profile are called Friends – and you become Friends by either submitting a Friend request to someone else, or accepting a Friend request when you receive one in an invitation form through Facebook.

The business side of Facebook begins with what is called a Fan Page – and you can guess what your community is called on the business side, right? Of course – Fans. Similar to the way a Friend request works, Fans come to your business page and Like your page. This indicates that they want to follow you and receive updates about your company in their Facebook News Feed.

Let’s get your Fan Page created so you can start seeing how we’ll interact on the business side of Facebook!

Simply go to facebook.com and login. You can easily find the Fan Page creation section by typing “create new facebook page” in the Facebook search area at the top of the page. You will be presented with a page that offers six options for the “type” of entity or business you are, ranging from Local Business or Place to a Cause or Community.

You can select any of the options, but most online businesses fall into the category of “Company, Organization or Institution”. While selecting a Category is required, the selection of the Company Name is very important. This impacts your branding, and how you are seen on Facebook. Consider aligning this name with your niche, your website and any other branding you may have initiated. Once past this entry point, this process, much like setting up your Personal Profile, is very step-by-step. Facebook walks you through each of the items necessary to build a basic Fan Page. This steps you through the information entry, and will suggest that you upload both a profile photo and a cover photo, similar to what you did on the personal side.

Toward the end of the process Facebook will recommend that you invite your Friends to Like your Fan Page – I recommend that you wait and ensure that your Fan Page presents the business image you want to convey prior to inviting people to like your Page. You can always do this at a later time.

This new social networking world we have created for our business community has tremendous possibilities. We can use this to engage and interact with our audience. Building community on a Fan Page works essentially the same way as we discussed our Personal Profile - through the sharing of posts, photos, infographics and other business related information, we can teach our community who we are, what we stand for, and that we can be trusted when we Advise them about a product. You’ll remember that Advise is the “A”, the last step in the Big IDEA.

Take the time this week to create a couple of posts on your Fan Page that are related to your niche. Y You’ll notice it works very much like your Timeline on your Personal Profile – with the exception of the Admin Panel at the top which provides a type of “dashboard” about your Page.

Choose items or create items and post photographs or graphics that would be of interest to the people of your community. Now, I realize that you don’t have a large community at this point, in fact you likely don’t have anyone in your Facebook community yet, but won’t it be wonderful when people arrive to your Fan Page they can already see information they are interested in!

Next week I’ll create a brief video that tours a Personal Profile and the business page to show you a bit more how they interact and serve each other, as well as your community.

Start the ball rolling with your business presence on Facebook, and I’ll see you in Week 15.

Kindest regards,

Greg Ray