Facebook Fan Page Vs Facebook Group

With more people using Facebook Fan Pages lately I also have heard people talking about Facebook Groups and how they relate to Facebook Fan Pages. For the most part people are looking for the difference between the two and when they should use one versus the other. This is a quick post just to outline some of the key points to be aware of when thinking about creating one or the other:

• Facebook Fan Page updates show in the fan news feeds which is very powerful, it takes advantage of the true value of the social network. If your fan likes it that goes along way with their friends, then their friend, etc, etc. This does not happen with Facebook Groups. This makes Facebook Fan Pages much more useful for a business to use for social marketing.
• Facebook Fan Pages are visible to users not registered with Facebook, this means that you have a chance to get your message to people that may not be Facebook users. This is important since Google indexes Facebook Fan Pages.
• Facebook Groups allow for bulk invites, one of my biggest frustrations with Facebook Fan Pages is having to manually do invites once the page is created. With a group you can do a bulk invite and so can the people that join the group. As other have pointed out, this makes them very powerful for viral networking of the group.
• Facebook Fan Pages allow for custom Facebook usernames which makes it easier to promote your page in text and offline places.

In my opinion a Facebook page is preferable for marketing messages and business promotion, a Facebook group is more for active discussions. To me the real value is the fact the Facebook page updates show in the fans news feed which is really a downfall for Groups since the group member has to proactively go to the group to see the updates, etc.

Small Business Facebook And Twitter Use Growing Fast!

Received a tidbit from a friend of mine citing a Merchant Circle survey showing some amazing numbers and something I have hit on with a few posts lately. More and more businesses are starting to understand the use of social media for use in directly connecting with their customers, here are a couple direct quotes from the survey results:

The online survey of 2,403 of MerchantCircle’s small-business members, conducted in September, found that 45% also have a presence on Facebook and Twitter with the express intent of promoting their businesses.

45 percent is a pretty amazing number in my mind, although it is pretty common for large corporations to start to take advantage of new technology (although not always in the most effective manner) it is very uncommon for smaller businesses to take advantage of it. What becomes very important to them is how they integrate this into their larger web presence, i.e. tying their website into their social media presence.

And another quote:

Internet2Go and MerchantCircle attributed this to the ease and low cost of participating in social media. Of the small businesses polled in the survey, 79% reported annual marketing budgets of less than $5,000 per year, with 44% spending less than $1,000 annually.

Now, this was a really interesting piece, the ease of use statement is interesting simply because most small businesses consider the Internet a very technical experience and that turns them away from using various marketing methods associated with it.

On another note, if you are investing in domain names in many cases they would likely look at anything web related as a marketing expense, if you think you are selling a domain name to a small business (which are the majority of potential customers) at large sums then you may want to think about their budgets a bit.

Facebook Page URL Instead Of Domains For Honda and Cranium

In a recent post concerning Facebook being used to promote offline businesses I mentioned that this will have some impact on domaining even if it is just small. Meaning, that the more people put their Facebook page URL, or Twitter URL on their business card or billboards the more it will have at least some bit of an impact.

Well, as I am sure all of you have witnessed, more and more we see large companies using their Facebook fan page URL in commercials or other advertisements instead of their website. I understand a bit of what they are trying to accomplish here, I would say we all agree having the direct interaction with customers on social networks is a great thing and a huge benefit to companies but too see it be the only URL used in a commercial is something that I am not sure I would do. I would think the smarter move would be to use your primary web presence to drive traffic to your social media pages and then once the person is a fan or follower use it in the other direction, use it to drive people to promotions, etc that may be on your primary web presence.

Now, all that said, I can see where maybe by using the Facebook page as the primary URL in their ad is being used to get them to be a "fan" so they can get continued traffic to their main site once links are posted, etc but I am still not sold that I would only promote with my Facebook URL. I am a big believer in making sure all the pieces work together and to me that starts at the website.

An example of this happening more and more is what brought this post on, last night while watching some post Trick or Treating Halloween shows I noticed two commercials in a row with Facebook URLs instead of website URLs. The first was for the game Cranium, Facebook.com/cranium and the next commercial was for Honda, and it ended with the URL Facebook.com/honda.

Now, lets be clear, neither one of these is the typical Facebook fan page we see created, these are business pages with much customization and actually pretty neat concepts but all in all it still is not their primary corporate presence. I actually find it very interesting and refreshing to see companies use social media like this but still find it a but interesting they would not direct people there from their main presence.

I think it is more than a little over the top to say that Facebook is creating a new Internet (if you understand the definition of what the Internet is you would know it just does not work that way) but I have read more than one story in the past few months that had stated just that, Facebook is creating its own web. Well, the more companies promote like this the more that maybe I still think it is way over the top but maybe just a little less so.

Example Business Uses Of Facebook

Recently I did a series of posts on how to setup a Facebook fan page as well as a few other Facebook fan page how to examples. After doing those I thought it may be good to list a few examples of various types of businesses taking advantage of the promotion that Facebook allows.

Here are a few to show the varied ways businesses are using Facebook pages:

Auto Spa Car Wash - I posted about this the other day and thought this was a good example of how a business, in the case a car wash, uses Facebook to promote their events, specials, and other offerings. This just shows with a bit of creativity almost any kind of business can take advantage of the social network effect.

Eagle Valley Golf Course - Someone the other day gave me some great examples of how they had seen golf courses using Twitter and Facebook. Here is a solid example of a course with  good group of friends. Perfect example of promoting events and special discounts online through their Facebook page to get people booking tee times.

Car Dealership -  Here is a dealership posting customer reviews as well as video reviews of various cars. Once again directly connecting with their fans and keeping a positive message out there. There were many bad car dealership examples, people with one post or 2 fans. Seems like alot of them jumped on the bandwagon but never had anyone help them take advantage of the initial motivation.

Ford Fusion - On a much larger scale here is an example of a company like Ford, who I continue to see using social media in various ways (they use Twitter quite a bit too but that is another post).  In this case they are promoting their go green and hybrid initiatives while promoting their Ford Fusion Hybrid. I think much of the value here is customers posting actual comments on the page. Nice job by an old school company.

LIFT Coffee Shop - This is a business that gets it, great use, using it to promote their menu items, specials. They post constantly keeping their hundreds of followers connected. Local coffee shops are places that people tend to connect with and hang out in, they get attached. This is a way to keep that going even outside of the shop.

As businesses start to use more than just advertising and their websites to promote their business I think it is very important to stay in touch with how they are using it. It is easy for those of us that have lived in an online word to just say, yeah everyone uses it, it is the next great thing. But I find it even more important to actually step back and take a look at how, and why it works for some and not others.

Facebook Being Used To Promote The Most Offline Business

I had to go no further than 1 mile from my house to find an example of an offline business starting to take advantage of social networking, in this case Facebook, to promote it's business. I was heading to dinner last night when I happened to see a sign at the car wash sign (see pictures to left, ignore spelling error) asking people to become of a fan of their Facebook page.

As a big proponent of using all the various tools a business has online to create a holistic marketing solution it was nice to see a business that is about as offline as you can get using social networking to promote themselves. I will become a fan because I think it will be a nice case study in an offline business using social networking.

As a domain investor it causes me slight concern, more and more I am seeing businesses promote themselves only with their Facebook page. We can all stand up and say no way can this effect us, but it does at some level, maybe not in a major way but in some minor way the more people start putting their Facebook or Twitter URLs on signs instead of their domain names in some minor little way it has an effect, there is no way to deny this if you are thinking rationally. I do not like it but it is what it is.

All that said, kudos to this small business owner in rural Missouri using all avenues to promote his business and offerings. On a side note, Nov 12th we are doing a seminar talking about just this topic to the local Chamber of Commerce member and surrounding town businesses. Seems like their may be a sympathetic ear or two in the audience...

How To Promote Your Facebook Fan Page

After my two posts concerning how to create a Facebook fan page and then how to set your Facebook fan page username I thought it only proper to finish off the series with a post on how to promote your Facebook fan page once you had it up and running. Here are the ways that have been found to be most effective, feel free to leave a comment with ways you have found effective in promoting your fan page after launching yours, if you have a new domain development and want a low cost way to promote your site a fan page is a great way to start:

Suggest to friends - This is the easiest way and should be the first thing you do after creating your page and making it public. You can do this right from the fan page. The only problem with this is that you have to select each friend individually which can be a bit time consuming if you have a lot of friends on Facebook. You will see the suggest to friends link on the left menu bar of the fan page.

Promotional graphic or icon - You can do this much like you do for a personal Facebook account, add a graphic to your website that says Find Us On Facebook. This works very well since you know the fans you get are truly interested in your site since they came from your site. This allows you to promote and target products to people that have interest from the beginning.

Blog about it - If you have a blog or a site that has the ability to add content why not announce your fan page. This is something I am getting ready to do with one of my sites.

Business cards - This is something that I am noticing more and more, people are including their Twitter and Facebook links on their business cards. This is a great way to promote your online world with old school leave behinds like a business card. I will be adding Facebook page links to my next set of business cards.

Email signatures - This is something I did for Twitter and still do with my blog at times, when I send business emails I will include an extended signature with my Facebook, Twitter, and blog links. Another free way to promote your brand.

Facebook advertising - Facebook makes it easy to promote your page, I did this with the Missouri.me fan page for the first day to gain a few more fans. This is easy to setup and was effective.

For guidelines on what you can and cannot do to promote your Facebook fan page or to download the Facebook badge to put on your site check this link: Facebook promotional guidelines.

Setting Your Facebook Username On A Fan Page

Setting your Facebook username for a fan page is just as important as setting it up for your personal account. I have noticed many people have overlooked this step when creating their fan pages so thought I would point out the details here real quick. It is an easy task but has a few caveats around it before you can do it. I did have some of this detail in my post about Creating A Facebook Fan Page but it was deep in the post and I had enough email questions and comments about the username specifically I though it best to do a quick post on it.

To set your Facebook username go to Facebook.com/username

When you get here sometimes it is not obvious immediately that you can set the fan page username, if you look just below the yellow box concerning your personal username you will see a sentence that says Set a username for your pages. If you click that link you will then have the option to set the name. This will allow you to select a keyword or other specific word or phrase that describes your fan page rather than the long URL created when you first build your page.

Keep in mind, this is a one time shot, they make this very clear. Check and double check your selection. After you do make your selection I have noticed that the page access can be unstable for several minutes to a half hour after making the change. Its worth it.

Make sure after you have made the change that you go change the link on any of your fan page links from your site that you are promoting since they old link will no longer work.

On a side note, this pages do very well in SEO, I have noticed that both the ifones.com fan page and Missouri.me fan page both rank well for certain terms. This can be good to gather new fans to promote your site too.

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