Create facebook Pages for Your Blogs

You need to create Facebook pages for your blogs and there are over around 1 billion reasons why. Facebook has become massive and the whole world seems to be jumping in on the bandwagon. So if you are blogging or trying to build an on-line 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 post links to your blog posts and of course you can interact with the people who ‘like’ your 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 1 billion 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 Timeline – 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.
• About – you can list your website or blog for your business here and if you go into the settings you can also connect to your personal page as the business page owner. Other information includes when your blog, website or business was created and 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 your personal video though, no YouTube for example, not that surprising really, but you can of course include YouTube videos by posting a link to them in your status updates.
• Notes – you used to be able to set up your feed from your blog automatically here, but you can’t do that anymore. Although you can create a note and use it as a blogging platform in its own right. When you click on Write a Note, you get a little wysiwyg interface and you can give it a title, add content, upload photos etc.
• 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
• Apps – you can add any number of different apps to your page, one I use is called Networked Blogs  and this one allows you to replace the automatic postings function you used to have in notes. Basically it adds all your posts from your blog automatically, but you do have to register with them and set it all up.

Facebook can be 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 ‘Pages’ on your ‘Home’ page, by clicking on your title for your page. Now you will see a button at the top of the  page called ‘Edit page’. Click on that and you will find you can access all the features that you need to set up your page with options to make changes to them.

There is also a button at the top of the page called ‘Build and Audience’. This is where you can share the page on your personal timeline, invite friends to like the page, invite your email contacts or create a Facebook advert (which of course costs you money).

• If you hover over the square box in the header section of your timeline you will be invited to add a profile photo, this is best done as a square photo, for obvious reasons. You get a similar option by hovering over the main header image but this time called ‘change cover’. The optimum size for this image is 850×315 pixels. Which is a little different to Google+ their size is 940×180 pixels. The best resolution for both is 96 pixels/inch.
• Promote with a ‘Badge’ – this is where you can create a widget (various options available) to add to your website or blog so people can easily fan your page, contents stream, photos of your fans and number of fans; all pretty much configurable. To access the ‘Badge’ widget you have to click on the little down arrow next to the ‘Activity Log’ which you will find on your personal Timeline.

The options above are free resources which anyone registered with facebook can use free of charge. Wherever you see a button saying promote your page or create an advert this will take you to the advert option which will require payment as mentioned earlier. 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.