Setting up a Facebook Page for your business: first 1,000 fans

Facebook passed 400 million active users earlier this year and is growing fastest among people over 35, which for most local and B2B businesses is the customer. Half of active users log in every day. When someone clicks Like on your Page, your updates can show up in their News Feed next to posts from their friends and family. No other channel puts you there, and for the moment it costs nothing but time.

The catch is that Facebook changes the rules often. Become a Fan became Like in April. The Page layout changed in February. Treat anything you build on a Page as rented space and keep your email list and your website as the things you own.

Create the Page from facebook.com/pages/create.php while logged into a personal account. The person who creates it becomes the first admin, so use an account belonging to the owner or a trusted long-term employee, then add a second admin immediately. Admins are invisible to the public, and a Page with a single admin who leaves the company is a Page you may never get back.

Choices that are hard to change later:

1. Category. Pick Local Business if you have a storefront or office people visit, Brand or Product if you ship nationally, Company if you are B2B. Local Business unlocks address, hours and map fields.
2. Name. Use the real business name, no slogans or keywords stuffed in. Facebook will not let you rename a Page once it has more than 100 fans.
3. Vanity URL. Once you hit 25 fans you can claim facebook.com/yourbusiness at facebook.com/username. Claim the same handle you use on Twitter if you have one.
4. Profile picture. The current layout allows an image up to 200 pixels wide by 600 tall. Use the full height: a logo at the top, a phone number and tagline underneath. Remember it is cropped to a small square in the News Feed, so put the mark in the top portion.

Fill the Info tab completely. Address, hours, phone, website, a two-sentence description with the words a customer would search for. The Info tab is public and indexed by Google, and a complete Page frequently ranks on the first page for your business name.

By default a stranger who visits your Page sees the Wall, which is fine for existing fans and poor for persuading new ones. Set a custom landing tab for non-fans with Edit Page, then Wall Settings, then Default Landing Tab.

The standard way to build one is the Static FBML application, which lets you add a tab containing your own HTML and images. A good landing tab does three things: tells a new visitor what you do in one line, gives a reason to click Like (a coupon, early access to specials, entry into a monthly drawing), and shows the Like button prominently. Keep it to one screen at 520 pixels wide.

Budget for this: a designer can build a simple FBML tab for $300 to $800. If you want fan-gated content that only appears after someone clicks Like, expect $800 to $2,000 from a developer.

The News Feed does not show every post to every fan. Facebook's ranking weighs how many people interact with your posts, so a Page that gets comments and Likes reaches more of its fans over time, and a Page that gets ignored fades.

Three rules that hold up:

• Write like a person. Sign posts with a first name if several people manage the Page. Reply to every comment within a business day.
• Photos outperform text. A post with an image takes up more space in the Feed and gets two to three times the interaction of a plain status.
• Do not automate everything. Piping your Twitter feed or blog RSS into the Wall makes the Page feel abandoned. One or two automated items a week is fine if real posts surround them.

Use the Insights tab weekly. Look at Interactions per post, not total fans, and watch Unsubscribes, which tells you when something you posted made people hide you.

The first 100 are easy and the next 900 are a grind. Use the Suggest to Friends link to invite your own friends, then ask every employee to do the same. That usually produces 50 to 150 fans in week one.

After that, work the channels you already have:

1. Email your list. A plain note from the owner explaining what fans get. One email to a 2,000-person list typically converts 3 to 8 percent into fans.
2. Put it everywhere physical. A Find us on Facebook sign at the register, on receipts, menus, invoices and business cards. Give the vanity URL, never the long numeric one.
3. Add the Like Box to your website. The social plugin launched in April shows faces of friends who already like you, which is the strongest nudge there is. Put it in the sidebar of every page, not just the home page.
4. Run a small Facebook Ads campaign. Target your city and a 25-mile radius, people over 25, and send the ad to your landing tab rather than your website. Cost per click in most US markets is running $0.40 to $1.20, and a Like from an ad typically costs $0.75 to $2.50. A $300 budget over three weeks can add 150 to 300 fans if the landing tab does its job.
5. Run one promotion. Facebook's promotion guidelines are strict, so avoid conditioning entry on Liking or posting, and run the contest through a third-party application such as Wildfire rather than on the Wall itself. Prizes of your own product work better than iPads, because they attract people who might buy.

Do not buy fans from services promising 1,000 for $50. They deliver accounts that never interact, which trains the News Feed algorithm to show your posts to nobody.

• Running the business as a personal profile and collecting friends instead of fans.
• Posting the same promotional message every day until people hide the Page.
• Leaving questions and complaints on the Wall unanswered for a week.
• Deleting negative comments instead of replying to them in public.
• Creating a Page and a Group for the same business. Pages are for businesses. Groups are for members to talk to each other.
• No link from the website to the Page and no link from the Page to the website.

We treat a Facebook Page as one piece of a connected system, not a project on its own. We start by discovering who the customers are, where they already spend time online and what they would want from you in their News Feed. We then plan the Page alongside the website, email program and any paid search, so that each one feeds the others. The build covers category and settings, a designed landing tab, the Like Box on the site and a 90-day posting calendar with real photography. Then we improve against Insights every month, moving budget toward what gets interaction and dropping what does not.

For a consumer brand with a loyal but scattered customer base, we built a content program that ran across the website, the email newsletter and a new Facebook Page, with a landing tab offering fan-only previews and a weekly photo series from the workshop. The Page became the fastest-growing of the three channels within a quarter and now drives a meaningful share of repeat visits to the site. You can read about that engagement at our content work.