Chances are that you only created a standard Facebook account to promote your band or business, which is bad! Now read on and find out why…
First of all Facebook accounts are for normal human beings and not intended to be used by brands, bands or companies and may be closed down at any time.
Secondly if you want to utilise Facebook to its fullest potential to promote yourself (or your clients), you are loosing out on a lot of features by not using the system correctly.
Thirdly…
Great features only available for Facebook Pages
- Facebook Pages Insights
- Facebook Insights are like Google Analytics, a tool to help you find out more about who accesses your page and a lot more details on other vital stats. Use this tool to find out what content is hot, how your page is doing overall and much more.
- Add apps to your page
- Like for normal users, you can add interactivity and engage more with your page visitors using apps. Either build your own or use one of the many readily available (eg. Twitter). Some apps work in slightly confusing ways – more about this later.
- Add your own custom stuff as tabs
- For example I regularly add subscription forms for artists mailing lists as a tab to my clients pages (eg. Love Amongst Ruin). You can pretty much add whatever you like as long as it is HTML, CSS and Javascript and doesn’t violate Facebook’s terms. Unlike MySpace, this give you great flexibility!
About Facebook Apps
Some apps, like Twitters, can be a bit daunting as they ask for permissions to authenticate with your personal accounts. Fret not! Any app needs to authenticate against a personal Facebook user account. If the app is written well, or specifically says it can be used on Pages, then you add the app to the pages once authorised.
To do cool things like publishing content from WordPress blogs for example, you first need to create an app on Facebook that handles the process via their API. Don’t worry about what that means, most plug-ins for publishing tools such as WordPress will walk you through this process very quickly. It’s not hard.
Shameless plug: If you rather had this taken care of by someone who knows his way around, give me a ring or drop me an email! 
How to use Facebook Pages
Ok, to be fair that title is probably slightly not what you think as I’m not providing a manual here. You can find that over on Facebook Pages Help instead. However I will focus on the simple steps you should take to maximise your visibility.
Since Facebook specially designed their ‘Pages’ feature to be used by businesses or artists such as musicians, it is important to know how to get it right.
If you don’t already have a personal account on Facebook, go create one (in your own name)
Once you have done that, you can create Pages
Notice the different options you have and pick one that suits you best. Read the options and choices carefully!
For example there’s a massive difference between pages for communities (eg. like a charitable cause) or an official page for a product, service, company, brand name, band or artist (etc)! If you pick the wrong one, your page may be removed or not be found because it’s wrongly categorised. It’s hard to change that later (delete page, create new page = a lot of extra work).
References and Resoures
You can find out more here:
- Official Facebook Pages page
- http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages
- Create a page on Facebook
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
- Help page for Facebook Pages
- http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=175
- Facebook Page Administration (page)
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage
- List with all the pages available
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/
- Facebook Insights
- http://www.facebook.com/insights/
- Facebook Applications
- http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
- Create Facebook Apps
- http://www.facebook.com/developers/createapp.php
- Your Facebook Apps (the ones you created!)
- http://www.facebook.com/developers/apps.php
- List of apps especially for Facebook Pages
- http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php?app_type=5&category=0
Epilogue
I hope you found this ‘little’ guide and the links helpful and enjoyed reading. If so, please check out the links to FREE stuff on the right side (eg. FREE online backup space) or leave me a comment below. If you are too exhausted, you would make me happy by just hitting the ‘like’ button 
If most of this still sounds like techno babble but you really want to make the most of your Facebook presence, why not get in touch and let me do it for you! I’m looking forward to helping you.
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