In his book, Crushing It , social media expert Gary Veynerchuk continues to stress the importance of Facebook for building a brand. He says, " If you're business isn't on Facebook, you're missing out on opportunities. Facebook gives you several options for building a presence for your home business. Many home businesses started simply using their Facebook profiles to post information about their businesses, but since Facebook limits the number of friends to 5,, it's better to have one of the other page options.
This is especially true if you want to keep your personal page privacy settings set to limit who can see your posts. Facebook offers several features to help you promote your home business. Here is a list of some of the options, and how you can use them:. Facebook Fan Pages. When Facebook first launched business-oriented pages, they were called Fan Pages, and people who liked them became fans.
While this terminology is still used by many, today, Fan Pages are usually called "Official" or business pages. Sometimes they're just called pages, while personal accounts are called profiles. Instead of becoming a fan, people "like" your business page. The benefit to a fan page over your profile page, is that unlike a profile, you can have as many "fans" as you can garner. Other benefits include:. Like profile pages, you can post information i. Plus you can have a call-to-action button, such as "Contact Us.
Businesses can use Facebook pages in a variety of ways including:. Through your Facebook pages , you can hold events. Community pages, in contrast, are outside the control of the businesses that are their topics. A business might have multiple fan pages that do not support the brand and that might, in fact, have negative content about the business. Tom Gresham is a freelance writer and public relations specialist who has been writing professionally since He graduated from the University of Virginia.
Home Social Media. Other Fan Pages In addition to the fan pages that promote businesses, other fan pages are based around topics, community groups, nonprofit organizations, specific causes, artists or bands, ideas and public figures such as politicians, celebrities and athletes.
Community User-Generated Pages Some Facebook community pages, which are a kind of fan page, can be confused with Facebook business pages. Community Auto-Generated Pages Facebook also has automatically generated community pages that it builds around ideas or topics. You can also install apps on a fan page. Facebook apps are applications within Facebook that do something when users interact with them or can run on their own.
The most popular apps on Facebook are games, but not all apps are games. Some apps, for example, let users play music or video from their Facebook page. Although some programming experience is important to develop feature-rich apps, you can create your own app even if you just have a basic understanding of HTML. The Facebook Developers page includes a Getting Started guide for detailed information link provided in Resources. Apps do have their own page, but these are for promoting and explaining the app itself, not the business behind the app.
As a business owner, there is no reason why you can't have your own app and your own business fan page. If you are in software development, creating an app first may make more sense because it can actively showcase your work.
A fan page requires less work to get started. You should be able to create a basic fan page in fifteen minutes. However a fan page requires regular activity, like new status updates and responding to fan comments, to keep it relevant and to keep it in fans' news feeds.
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