Faith and Business 101: Making Your Fan Page the Best it can be!

One of the first questions I usually receive from people who are just starting out on Facebook is, “should I have a group or a fan page to promote my business?”

The answer is: FAN PAGE!

The bottom line is that a fan page is indexed by Google and a group is not!

I actually have both. I have a fan page for my business, but then I have a private group for the mom partners on my site. This is where we connect on a more personal level, share prayer requests, post announcements that apply to our group members only, etc. The fan page group really works as a cyber “staff meeting” if you will!

Your Fan Page should be your one-stop-shop for your business. You can add all of your links to the information areas on your page, set up events, start discussions, etc. As you want to spread the news about a new product or share a specific website or blog post, you can past that to your fan page wall as well!

Did you know that you can link your fan page directly to your twitter account? Now you don’t have to do double duty! No longer will you have to write a fan page post and then go to twitter to retweet it! You can go to www.facebook.com/twitter and all of your fan page wall posts will be tweeted automatically! How cool is that? It’s worked very well for my business. (As an aside, make sure you are not auto-tweeting all the time! Get on twitter and interact with people, respond to tweets, be personable…or you will lose followers and will be completely missing the point!)

Another great way to market on your fan page is offer some giveaways to random fans! Facebook recently changed some of their rules and the are recently cracking down on companies that break them (in the form of deleting your account with NO WARNING!) so make sure you follow facebook’s guidelines (found on the Facebook home page) when promoting your business. As long as you host your giveaway off of your actual fan page—like posting about the giveaway on your blog and then linking to it from your fan page—you are fine! For example, I had a giveaway last month. I offered 1 random fan a starbucks gift card. They had to come to my blog to comment and then I picked a winner! Make sense?

You can find a fantastic resource on fan pages for business on this blog:
https://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/

And I’d like to leave you with a favorite scripture:

Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. – Romans 12:11-13

(Yes, you can even practice those things on your Facebook fan page!)  :-)

Until next time…

MariLee Parrish

Copyright © MariLee Parrish, Moms of Faith, All Rights Reserved