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With over 23 million Facebook users in the UK in 2010, the chances are you’re aware of the social networking online phenomenon. More and more businesses are finding a value in utlising this social media platform and creating a Facebook business page is simple, but here are some tips and common mistakes that people make when setting up a Facebook page for their business.

Five top tips for a successful business page.

1. Setting up your page

Setting up a business page can seem difficult, as long as you create the page linked from a personal account then there shouldn’t be any problems. Remember, whenever using your page, make sure you switch from your personal account to use Facebook as the business page.

2. Information

When adding information to your Facebook page, make sure you put in the address of your business so people can find you! Also make sure that once you have finished adding all your information you click the publish button, otherwise your Facebook page won’t display the information.

3. Linking Facebook and Twitter

One of the most commonly asked question is how do I link Facebook and Twitter? Well you can link the two sites together using the Twitter App on Facebook. However if this is causing some problems you can always use third party websites, for example Hootsuite, which allows you to control lots of different social media sites at once.

4. Updating Information

It is very important to keep your Facebook Business Page up to date whether it be any special offers or just general news, for example someone new joining your team. It is good to keep pictures up to date as well, even if it is just pictures from a company Christmas Party! Social media is about developing personality, relationships and familiarity between companies.

5. Put links to Facebook

If you have a website, put a link in to Facebook. This gets more people looking at your Facebook page if there is a button they can click on and it takes them straight to your Facebook page and vice versa.

While Facebook marketing is on the rise among small businesses, many are still struggling to master the basics. If in doubt ask a company that knows.

Five Common Mistakes People make when setting up a Facebook page

1. How not to set up your page

Some people make the mistake of thinking that they have to create a fake person to be able to set up a business page. If you do this it only creates problems, meaning you have to log in to the fictitious you to amend etc. It is more useful to have the page linked to your actual personal account.

2. Not investing adequate time

Another common mistake is not putting enough time into keeping a page up to date. Every time you have news you want to shout about, put it on Facebook as more and more people are using Facebook.

3. Being boring or unpredictable

When they’re thinking about marketing, some business owners forget that Facebook is a social place where people share things they find funny, interesting or useful with their friends. Think about what kind of content your fans would actually want to share when planning your posts.

4. Not knowing enough about Facebook

Since Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites in the world, it’s good to know how to use Facebook to optimize the effectiveness of your page and increase traffic.

5. Violating Facebook’s terms

Not only is it critical to know how Facebook works and what tools are available, it’s also important to know the rules, for example Facebook  recently disabled pages of Pizza Hut India, Cadbury Bournville and FCUK India for running promotions on their walls. Take time to go through Facebook’s guidelines, to understand what you can and what you cannot do on Facebook Page.

Unsure about using Facebook?

If you’re not, users sign up and create their personal profile page. Once you’ve completed the basic details about yourself you wish to, it’s time to search for friends and send our friend requests.

You can search for friends from a range of sources; known schools, workplaces and start growing the people you connect with. Fan pages and Groups are set up in support of different causes or covering common interests – indeed MyChurchdown has a Facebook group you can join which can act like an online noticeboard to let people know what’s going on. So come and join us!

Photos are another key element to Facebook where users can upload pictures and ‘tag’ their friends to further link people and events together. (You may see friends of friends that you want to connect to and so on.) Videos, instant messaging and games further add to its usability and appeal, whilst the increase in prominence of internet enabled mobile phones also aiding its addictiveness.

Similar to Twitter (article soon!) users type status updates of what they might be doing, which are shown in a newsfeed that their friends can view, laugh at, ‘like’ or comment on. These may be anything from incidental observations or random nuggets of information to sharing news or feelings.

What started as a University directory at Harvard has grown to have a major social impact around the globe and be accepted in language and society. Banned in many workplaces for wasting employee’s time, the site is credited with reuniting long lost families and beginning relationships at one end of the scale as well as being suggested as a cause of infidelity and divorce at the other.

Absolute Creative Marketing is on Facebook!

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