You need to create facebook pages for your blogs and there are over 400 million reasons why. facebook is becoming massive and the whole world seems to be jumping in on the bandwagon. So if you are blogging or trying to build an online business you will ignore this resource at your peril.

From a blogging perspective not to create a facebook page is actually a bit of a waste. Once it is set up all you have to do is import your blog posts automatically and everything you publish will be shared on your facebook pages. So you have to ask yourself the question, why would you not do that? It is completely free, you will make the information immediately available to over 400,000,000 facebook members and you have all the social media tools you need at your fingertips to start building relationships with like minded people, people in the same business as yourself and potential customers.

Using facebook Pages

So what are the facebook page’s tools:

• The Wall – this where you can share whats on your mind via a status update, put in a URL and an automatic link will be added before you share it.
• Info – you can list your websites, blogs and other resources for your business here. You can also show when your blog, website or business was created, what it’s all about, what your mission is and the products you are offering; if any. These features are sort of reminding you to take a professional approach to your page much the same way as a serious business does
• Photos & Videos – self explanatory really, and as discussed previously people like different mediums and using photographs and videos are another means of communication. As far as I can see they need to be personal video though, no YouTube for example, not that surprising really
• Discussion – this is like a mini forum, a great way to start talking about a topic and get insight from others, talk about problems solutions and an option to get and give advice
• Notes – this is where you can set up your feed from your blog automatically or if you prefer you can create a note and use it as a blogging platform in its own right. You can use a filter from here to select who you share with, first you click on the + symbol next to share, then the down arrow next to the little padlock at the bottom and then you can finally customize who you send it to
• Events – this is a tab where you can create an event at a location of choice and then invite people to attend, many private users use this to arrange parties or a reunion for example. But as a business or charity you could use it to invite customers along to your latest promotion or fund raising event
• Links – the links function allows you to add a share button to your browser bookmarking toolbar so that when you find a website you would like to share then you can simply click on the button and post it to your wall. There is also an option there to for visitors to subscribe to your links with an RSS type feed, I am still trying to work out how to post it to my page wall rather than my personal profile and when I do I will let you know

That brings me to my final point, I find facebook a little bit difficult to navigate, well certainly not intuitive anyway. So when it comes to setting up all the features of your page what you need to do is go into the page screen, accessed from your menu on the left where it says ‘Ads and Pages’ on your ‘Home’ page.

Then click on your title for your page. Now you will see a menu down the left that should give you various options for the page, the main one of interest being ‘Edit page’. Click on that and you will find all the tabs I have discussed, and a few more probably, with options to make changes to them.

There is also a column to the right of the applications where you will see a heading called ‘Promote Your Page’ under that heading are the categories

• Promotion Guidelines – here you will find a logo (image) that you can upload to your website or blog and then add a link to it back to your page, exactly like the one at the top of the post. It also tells you where and how you can use the logo
• Promote with a like box – this is where you can create a widget (various options available) to add to your website or blog that includes things such as a like button so people can easily fan your page, contents stream, photos of your fans and number of fans; all pretty much configurable.
• Send an Update – this is a means of sending an email to your fans from your page if you want to tell them about something specifically

The options above are free resources which anyone registered with facebook can use free of charge. Wherever you see a green button saying promote your page or create an advert this will take you to the advert option which will require payment. Up to you if you want to use paid advertising, I haven’t as yet but it could well be a cost effective option, especially given the size of the audience.

So that is it, go and visit my facebook page and see what it looks like. If you like what you see then you are only one click away from becoming a fan, so use 1 second of your time and make that click. it will be appreciated.

Hopefully this post just made using facebook pages a whole lot easier and understandable and has inspired you to go an create facebook pages for your businesses.