Much ado about very little - Lessons in building a Facebook Page

As we consult in the area of new media we felt it would be useful to at least have gone through the process of setting up a Facebook Page (not a Profile, a Page - for a Business).

We decided to set up our Blog (Broadstuff) rather than the company (Broadsight) as it seems that (i) you can set up as a service on Facebook Pages, and this blog is of course a Web Service and (ii) I just am not willing to put any of our business's content under the Facebook T&C*.

Anyway, the setup phase seems very simple - fill in the basic details, upload a picture, set a few toggles and there you go. So here is us for all you rabid Broadstuff readers out there .

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=5840866951

Of course, you are no longer our readers, nor even our "friends", but you are now our "fans". And if you buy anything off us you are now our FanSumers. Lucky you

Anyways...now we are Bona Fide Page, what next?

Advertising of course...what else are you supposed to do with a Page

Well, you can elect to start advertising to les masses...fill in a form and tell F/B how much you will spend per day, and what you will spend per Ad - starting at $5 per day (aha....at 365 days per year thats $1,800 odd per annum...NOW we know where that $15bn assumption comes from)

There are some options:

Advanced Targeting - Target by age, gender, location, interests, and more.
- only problem is I can only target one country, which is fairly useless as we have a global readership. I targeted UK with 7 million people, added "internet" and got down to about 30,000 targets (what are the others up to I wonder?)

Content Integration - Get noticed, not skipped.
This is the function where it adds your Fans' thumbnail to your Ad (eg Joe Sixpack bought a Broadstuff Widget today)

Flexible Pricing - Buy clicks (CPC) or impressions (CPM). Minimum payment $5 per day
Well, $0.1 per click and $ 0.15 CPM minima - an order of magnitude lower than MR Z was hinting towards in all the hoo-ha. You also choose whether the Ad is shown in Ad space or News Feed (its an either/or - what sort of people will choose to show Ads in news feeds I wonder)

Trusted Referrals - Attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.
(Aka the Flack function - turned this off instantly)

Well, deciding not to Advertise (and thus keep our friends) we decided to do the Olde Fashioned viral thing first and blogged about it to drum up bizniss - i.e. this post is to YOU, dear reader.

So, what else can you actually do with a page apart from flog it?.

Well, not much as yet. I can add events, video, text, write on my wall etc but its all manual - no RSS feed to update stuff dynamically (as you can with a personal profile) so its all a bit high maintenance.

I was also very disappointed with the applications - being a more "business" oriented facility I was interested to see what Apps there were, so in I dived to find what the options were. Well, I can (to use a few) find out:

- what sort of naughty girl, sex position or sex in the city character I am
- Choose my shoe of the day and get hugs to boot
- Join N number of Indie/ Punk/ whatever music services

...in short, all those same student jape Apps that F/B is (in)famous for. No doubt there are more business oriented applications in there, but they are not brought out in any way I could see.

So in short, yes, you can put up a Facebook Page for your business / service very quickly, but you can do very little with it apart from pay to advertise it, and the Applications you can add are the same ones that your Friends use.

Now excuse us while we find out how Australian we all are.....

* Those same old draconian T&C seem to apply. Its unacceptable for a profile imho, but for a business I'd say its actually quite risky to be bound under their T&C - what happens to trademarks and other IP if you have in effect signed over an agreement to let Facebook use them ad infinitum?


Postscript - just seen this article telling us a Facebook Page is a must have. I looked for a Facebook Page from said blog (Search Engine Journal) and didn't find one by the way! Hmmm...Kool Aid and all that. Hype surfing...surely not

Post-Postscript - This article tells you about 5 "favourite" business widgets in Facebook (do you fan a widget?)