Now that we talked about landing pages for your Facebook ads, I wanted to show you how to build a Facebook fan page.  Remember, people have profiles and friends.  Businesses have pages and fans.  In addition to using a fan page as a landing page (as we discussed in my last post), a fan page is important to make it easy for users to find you and as a viral marketing tool.  Your fan’s friends will see that their friends are following you, and hopefully they will follow you too.

Facebook, for some reason, makes it hard to find the add fan page area.  Goto the bottom of any Facebook page and you will see a button that says Advertising, see below….

After clicking that, the screen below will pop up, and you will need to click the button that says Pages.

Finally, we are getting close.  The page below is an index page that offers some advice areas and the big green button for Create a Page.

After clicking the green button, the screen below pops up.  You are now actually creating a fan page.  The first question asks you to select a category, from many choices.  If you have a restaurant, select local.  If you are a consultant, select public figure.  After that, you select the name of the group, and you are done.  From there, the fan page will be displayed and be ready for you to add content…….

Great Facebooking!

The final, and by far the most , important piece of advertising on Facebook is what we will call the landing page.  Creating an ad is easy and not nearly as important as where the ad points to.  On Google, the ads point to you website, driving traffic directly to the site that sells your good or service.  This wont work on Facebook.

The most important consideration for advertising on Facebook is to remember why people are on the site.  When people are on Google, they are shopping. When they are on Facebook, they are there to check on their friends.  They are not there to shop.  Nor does Facebook take it kindly when marketers interfere with their users’ online experience.  Meaning, we must advertise different on Facebook.  And the primary implication of this is no ads that go directly a sales page.

The landing page is the web-place where your Facebook ad will send users. Remember a couple posts ago when we talked about designing a good ad? Remember how we talked about asking a question in the top title bar?  A good ad asks a question that entices users to click your ad.  Something like, “Want to lose 25 pounds by Christmas?”  And then a resolution statement, “Click here to learn how.”  The “click here” should lead to a landing page that answers the question asked in the title bar.  But, this page does not sell, does not push, does not try to be aggressive.

The best landing page is therefore a sandwich page, something between the ad and the ultimate sales page.  Click here for an answer to the question, a sandwich page that answers the question and offers a discount or a special offer, and then a link to your normal sales page.  The sandwich page should give value, but not slow the sales process.  It should be short, answer the question, offer some content, perhaps have an opt-in box where users can add their email, may include a short video, maybe will send them to a blog, and then sends them to a sales pitch.  The sandwich page can be internal to Facebook, as a fan page, or external to Facebook.  Internal pages are more trusted by users, but you lose some control.  External pages offer more flexibility, but may scare users when they see they have left Facebook.

After clicking on an ad that asks, “Do you want to be the next apprentice?”, you land on the page above.  It is good.  It offers the answer the question and allows you to click on a sales page.

We cannot over-estimate the importance of a good landing page.  Click on lots of ads and study the landing pages before you design your own.

More to come……..