Facebook for Business

Using Facebook as a business can be an interesting exercise in anger management. Facebook is a powerful tool, especially for individuals, but it can drive an intern batty as she tries to set up new pages or migrate Groups to Pages. (Yes, Crissy, the Boxcar Marketing intern, has spent a lot of time with our friend Facebook.) Let me share our experience.

Earlier this year Facebook changed the way that businesses can network in this social space. They upgraded the Pages functionality to better house business profiles. Pages are not identical to Personal Profiles, but they do give a business more leverage than a Group.

With a Page, people interested in following your organization can become fans of your Page. On your Page, you can host photos, videos, RSS feeds, and custom applications.

Creating a Page
A Page needs to be administered by a person so start by creating a Personal Profile (for a real person because fake accounts are removed by Facebook). The Personal Profile should be of someone in your company who is going to stick around for awhile. Then follow the links to create a Page. You can change and add administrators to your Page after it is set up.

You will be asked to select what type of Page. Choose wisely because you can not change it afterward. By choosing the type of Page, you are choosing a default set of fields to complete. For example, choosing Band gives you opportunities to bring in a playlist. Choosing Public Figure - Government Official asks for your date in office.

Adding Stuff to Your Page
A Page can have all sorts of tabs, including Wall, Info, Photos, Discussions, Events, YouTube, Notes, Boxes.

Wall is where your status feed aggregates. Info is what you want to tell the world about your organization. Photos are, well, photos. Discussions are discussion forums where you can start a topic and have fans discuss it. Events is an aggregated listing of events you are hosting. YouTube is your YouTube channel. You enter your YouTube details and your videos are automatically pulled into Facebook, which is nice because it eliminates the redundancies of uploading videos to two places. Notes is for mini-blog posts or links to things you like. And Boxes is a crazy place where all sorts of things can be pulled into one spot, like videos, RSS feeds, photos, etc.

Editing Stuff on Your Page
Here is another opportunity to lose your mind. To edit most applications (Discussions, YouTube, Notes), you go to the Wall of your Personal Profile and click the “Edit Page” link on the top left. From here, click on the pencil icon in the top right corner of the application box to edit and change its settings.

You can move application boxes to your Wall or to your Boxes tab by clicking on the pencil icon next to the Application name. Applications can be either on your Wall or in your Boxes tab, but cannot be in both places at once.

To move applications around in the Boxes tab, just drag them. That is the easiest part of this whole admin experience.

Claim Your Facebook Username
Visit http://www.facebook.com/username to claim a shortcut name to your Page. Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation was temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 that have more than 100 fans can now claim a username.
http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

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