MLV WritesBlog of Monica Valentinelli, Writer & Content Consultant

Posted on November 3, 2008 - by Monica Valentinelli

How to Create a Facebook Page on the New Facebook

Be Profitable Tools

Do you have a profile on Facebook? Have you seen those pages circulating around Facebook where your friends can become a fan of authors, movies, books and more? You can create a Facebook page as a way to promote your book or game, too. I’d like to help show you how.

    STEP ONE: NAVIGATE — Click on the Create a Facebook Page link. If you have an existing Facebook account, I recommend not logging in to Facebook until the prompt appears.

    Please note that as of April 14, 2009, you will have to “verify” your account via an electronic signature. It appears that Facebook is trying to ensure that a live person is behind the page in a profile, so businesses can no longer appear anonymously.

    Here is what Facebook is looking for, in their own words from their “Help” section: “The name you enter as your electronic signature should match the name on your account. If you have a business account with no name or profile, or are trying to create an account when you create your Page, please enter your legal first and last name as your electronic signature.”

    STEP TWO: CHOOSE YOUR PAGE TYPE — Choose what kind of a Facebook page you want to create. The choices are: Local (For a company or business), Brand or Product (Self-Explanatory) or Artist, Band or Public Figure (Band, Musician, Writer, etc.) for a personal profile. For this example, I’m going to choose the third option.

    STEP THREE: NAME YOUR PAGE — If you’ve chosen “Writer,” you’ll want to type in your author name. I don’t have a pen name, so I’m going to create a page for me. Once you’ve put in what name you want to be referred to and searched by, click on the blue “create page” button.

    STEP FOUR: LOG IN — Log in to the prompt here, or create your Facebook log in.

    STEP FIVE: CUSTOMIZE YOUR PAGE — Now that you’ve created your Facebook page, you have the ability to customize it in a number of different ways, specific to the page type that you’ve chosen. Here are a few of the ways that you can choose to customize your Facebook page.

      Add a Picture: The maximum filesize for an image is 4 megabytes. I’ve found that a good picture size to use is 250 pixels wide by 250 pixels tall because there is a lot of white space on the page.

      Pull in Your RSS Feed: To pull in your blog or website’s RSS feed to ensure there is current content on your page, you’ll want to click on the “Add a Note” feature. On the right hand side in a small, grey box you’ll see “Notes Settings” where you can import your blog.

      You will see your full expanded posts in the “preview,” but this is not how the RSS feed will show up in your Facebook page. Once you confirm the import at the bottom of the page, your RSS feed will display in the “Notes” box on a per post, per title basis.

      Add Information: Underneath your profile picture is a place to add information about you, your brand or your product. I recommend adding one or two paragraphs of text written in a style appropriate for people who don’t know anything about you, your company or your product.

      Add Video: If you’re playing around with video, I’d like to mention that there is an extra “verification” layer to use that option and the upload is not immediate. One option would be to have a shorter video in the “Video” box, and offer a link to your existing video by posting it on your wall.

      Favorite Other Facebook Pages: If you are a company and have a product, you can add your product’s page as a “favorite” and vice versa. This is a good way to help your customers and fans become familiar with what you’re offering.

      Rearrange Content: You may be looking at your page wondering where you can find photos or videos to add. If you don’t have content for every box, I recommend rearranging the elements on your Facebook page so the boxes that you do have content for show up first. I also recommend posting on your wall with a personalized message so the spot doesn’t appear to be empty.

    STEP SIX: PUBLISH — After you’ve customized your Facebook page, you have to “publish” the page to make it live.

    STEP SEVEN: PUBLICIZE — Now that you have your new Facebook page, you’ll want to publicize it and get “fans.” You can do that either through word-of-mouth advertising, through a Facebook ad or by adding a Facebook badge to your website.

      Adding a Facebook Badge: To add a Facebook badge to your website once you’ve created your page, refer to the “Help” section of Facebook. In this series of articles about How to Create a Facebook Badge, you’ll be able to read more about it. If you’re logged in to Facebook, you can also click on create a Facebook badge and follow the customization instructions.

For an example of a recent Facebook page that I had created, take a peek at Musicnotes.com on Facebook. Remember, that getting fans and people to interact on your Facebook page will take time. Regardless, it’s a good idea to know what Facebook promotional tools you have out there not just because this page creation is free — but because Facebook continues to be a popular social media outlet that you may want to consider branching into.

Hope you found this article helpful in your quest to promote you and your work. If you have a Facebook page you’re looking to promote, either send me or post the link in the comments below and I’ll follow up later this week with a list!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Be Profitable, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

70 Comments

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  1. Visit My Website

    August 20, 2009

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    Monica said:


    The “discussion group” is different functionality from the “updates” that show up on your wall. In order to delete something you’ve written as part of a group, you need to click on the link and delete the post once you’re inside the topic. Sometimes caching, ad block software or anything like “no script” (e.g. the things that remove Javascript functionality) can also affect how you interact with Facebook.

    If you still can’t delete the content from your page after trying all avenues, I do recommend contacting Facebook directly. They may be able to help.



  2. Visit My Website

    August 21, 2009

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    govind said:


    how to create something like facebook.com/cocacola



  3. Visit My Website

    August 29, 2009

    Permalink

    Monica Valentinelli said:


    Coca Cola and other big brands often create custom pages in house and pay a substantial fee to do so. I’m not 100% sure if there was a fee charged for Coke’s page, but what they created isn’t a standard feature for how Facebook pages typically work.



  4. Visit My Website

    September 28, 2009

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    abeer said:


    Hi
    thanks for the article, it is very helpful
    I would like to ask about something
    how can you change the displayed url of the page on facebook
    many people have the url as:
    http://www.facebook.com/PAGENAME
    kindly inform me if you haw it can be done



  5. Visit My Website

    October 1, 2009

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    Nicole said:


    Hi – We are wondering if there is a way to “share” a posting on a business page and it goes out to all the status update pages of our fans. (Our example is in careerbuilder.com – there is the button to “share” and we can easily see how to do that on our personal pages – but we would like to make the “share” feature work with our business page – to share a job posting that we have on careerbuilder.com). Would you happen to know how to do that?

    (I know that we can post the link to that page, but then you have that messy link showing up at the top – just looks nicer if we can easily use the “share”
    feature). Thanks in advance for any advice!!



  6. Visit My Website

    October 1, 2009

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    Monica Valentinelli said:


    @abeer: For more information about setting up a page name URL, go to: http://www.facebook.com/username. The URL isn’t available for everyone; you need to have a certain number of fans to use it.

    @nicole: When you “share” content through the Wall on your Facebook fan page, it will go through your FB fans profiles. Posting a link provides the same functionality as “share.” You can also add an RSS feed through the “notes” feature, which is probably what you want to do if you have a lot of content for job postings.



  7. Visit My Website

    October 2, 2009

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    Jeremy Pope said:


    A great help in getting our Penguin New Zealand Travel Guide: North Island page up and running! Thanks a million. JP



  8. Visit My Website

    October 20, 2009

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    Alyssa said:


    Hi Monica,

    I already have a Facebook page made for my company. After poking around other business pages… I noticed many are customized. If you look at Victoria’s Secret, they have their background customized. Is there some type of codes to do this? Also I just added Static Fbml yesterday, is there codes to customize this box?

    Thank you!



  9. Visit My Website

    October 20, 2009

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    Monica Valentinelli said:


    Actually, if you click on the “Wall” you will see that the businesses use the same functionality as I’ve described above. What these businesses did is add custom code to a new tab on their wall and then changed their “wall” settings to show that tab. I recommend visiting this fan page from Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages ). There you’ll find the information on additional applications you’ll need; the Victoria’s Secret fan page uses the Flash app.

    You (or your company) will have to generate the code that you’ll need for any apps you install, including the Static FBML or the Flash plug-in; Facebook doesn’t provide that code customization.



  10. Visit My Website

    October 20, 2009

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    Alyssa said:


    Thank you Monica! You were very helpful. One thing though- the Facebook pages link doesn’t work. Is there a different one?



  11. Visit My Website

    October 20, 2009

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    Monica Valentinelli said:


    Should work now.



  12. Visit My Website

    October 20, 2009

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    Brian said:


    How do you add pictures and separate paragraphs in “Boxes” on FB fan pages?



  13. Visit My Website

    October 22, 2009

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    Alyssa said:


    New question of the day :)

    Is there any way to receive a notification if a “fan” writes on our PAGE profile? Not the personal profile. Some of our fans are commenting on our page and we aren’t being notified.
    Thanks for your help!

    Alyssa



  14. Visit My Website

    October 22, 2009

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    Monica Valentinelli said:


    @Brian – If you’re logged in as an Admin, you should be able to simply click on the plus sign and use that functionality. If you’re looking for something more customized, then you have to install one of the other page apps and add HTML code. See: http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages for more information on things you can do.

    @Alyssa – No, there is no notification for fan pages other than the Subscribe to SMS link (e.g. through the cell phone) which I don’t bother with.



  15. Visit My Website

    October 24, 2009

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    Bert said:


    When I tried to set up a fan page I spent a lot of time uncovering the fact that I need a website to link to. This is something that should be stated much earlier in the process.



  16. Visit My Website

    November 27, 2009

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    andres said:


    help me create a facebook game



  17. Visit My Website

    November 29, 2009

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    Monica Valentinelli said:


    I’m sorry, but if you want someone to create a Facebook game, I recommend hiring a programmer to do it.



  18. Visit My Website

    December 9, 2009

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    Christopher said:


    how do i create a permalink to statuses i make on facebook.. so when I send the link, only the status appears instead of the entire page.. Like this company did.

    http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=195550161087&id=285521085042

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