When you login to your facebook profile what comes up is your account profile but when you surf ads related to any products on facebook. Why do these brand and organisation sites have pages instead of profiles on facebook? Let us understand that now!

Social networking site refer profiles to users who login, surf and comment on posts. Through your profile you can post images, tag your dear ones in it and comment on the image, you can also add friends, acquaintance, form groups to share ideas and do a lot more activities. Your Facebook profile summates all your likes, movies, books, relationship status, DOB etc.

Your Brand is not a specific Individual, It cannot have a favourite book, movie list or relationship status, you cannot send a friend request to your Brand, Product neither can your favourite brand accept it from you. Just like user profiles have friends, similarly Brand Pages have Fans. On Brand Page fans share new incorporated ideas, their views about new products launched and communicate your link to their friends and share information about your brands with others.

Facebook has been designed in simple to understand manner that it always provides its user with 99% uptime and easy to navigate functions. Most importantly it has provided businesses with large audience under single group. It not only connects individuals to each other but also helps carryout B2C activities. Hence Facebook is termed as “Best Social Networking Site for Businesses”. But marketing on facebook is not an easy task for the organisation. Brand building is not the simplest process.

When facebook first introduced the idea of B2C whole lot of brands pounced on the site and developed fan pages for their organisation. This created a mess between the audience and the organisation. Remember, people you’re targeting for your brand have probably been using Facebook more often and for longer than you have. Unless your approach is pitched perfectly you may end up doing more harm than good for your marketing campaign over social media portals.
Always keep in mind the following differences: –

Profiles are meant for Audience: – Yes I mean it, profiles are not meant for organisation, if you are promoting brand using a profile then let me tell you, Facebook is good at banning such profiles for too much marketing activity.

Groups are not for Organisation: – Groups help you to convey your information to certain audience, instead of posting stories and post to an individual person, you are given privilege to post in single group which will be notified to everyone linked to that group. Carrying out Brand campaign using group as a medium does not fit the idea. Group is meant for likeminded people who share their ideas related to particular group or topic for which the group is formed. You can exchange contact information if your gadget gets lost, through a group but you cannot apply same principle for a Brand / Organisation campaign using group.

Pages for your Brand Marketing: – After you set up page for your Brand promotion try to get updates through your other social media sites on Facebook Page. Keep in mind not to replicate your website as it is on to the Fan Page. Try to get audience by putting out images, poll questions session, get them indulge on to your page by getting out new ideas. For getting started up with your Page for your website on Facebook I would like you to go through few organisations’ pages and get the insight of how they carry out their Fan building activity for their site.

If you have already created a Profile or Group for your Brand or Organisation before Fan Page was introduced don’t feel sad. Just Contact Facebook to get all contacts migrated to your Facebook Fan Page.

In today’s world even a 7 year kid knows what is Facebook, though his definition for using it might be just to show the world how fast he has grownup or mere friend finder site, or a virtual world where he has better score on games that are available rather than his academics, for few teenagers its where they explore themselves as a winner because they are boring and shy in actual world.

But seriously I would like to put forth few statistics about why Facebook should be used as a medium to promote your Business on social media:

• Facebook has 100 million active users till date.
• Average of 300K users Join Facebook daily.
• About 49% users work as Technical’s, Executives, Managers over Facebook.
• The Fastest growing site where age bar is above 13 year old.

Until 2007 big organisation’s had setup businesses pages for their Brand, but now facebook has provided businesses of all category to share their business products through Facebook and that too for Free. Now to generate revenue they have started Ads on Facebook which is charged $10 per day and $350 for yearly subscription, organisations are happy to pay small amount and in return get more than million customers as traffic to their site. For Brands Facebook has provided users with Fan Page where in the fans of brands will come and share their thoughts and exchange information with their friends.

Now the Main question arises how to go about creating a Fan Page for your Brand?

Follow the below given steps: -

1. Visit the URL: – http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

2. Select the Best category for your Brand (Go thoroughly through this category selection process as it may be
tedious to make changes letter on.)

3. Insert Your Brand name and Click on “Create Page”.

4. Insert Short Description as to what your Brand is all about. I would recommend to keep it short or equivalent to a snippet content.

5. Click on your business name in the top left corner (it’s a hyperlink) and then click “publish this page” (until you do this, nobody but you will be able to see your new Facebook business profile).

6. Once your Page is created you can click on the Like button and become first Fan for your own Page.

Now the trick starts over here. As soon as you become fan of your own fan page, your friends will be notified of your recent activity and will surely navigate to the link of your fan page to notice what it is all about, also you can send invitation to your friends to join Fan Page of your Brand, in turn getting active user traffic to your website.

I have been visiting quite a few organisational, educational sites but even though they have domains over 3 years + old their rank value is still low as compared to domain age. The traffic to their website is low than expected; few follow regular panda and penguin updates but still fail to meet the desired expectations. When asked why don’t you generate content and blog for your website to get maximum crowd and optimize your website? I get to hear the same answer from most of the Individuals – “I don’t have time to blog” OR “Blogging is not relevant for my Business”, “We are already pre-occupied with our activities and we don’t want to hire Blogger as it increases our expenditure for nothing”.

Even though ROI (Return on Investment) may deliver different result to you and your site but in long run it will deliver you with best result than expected. There are few benefits of corporate blogging that should be considered by you: -

Gain Wide Exposure through your Content: – Your Content speaks for you and your Organisation, keep updating your posts every now and then this will help you to divert traffic to your post and get maximum crowd to read about the ongoing news in your business. Reports are generated every quarter and then people get to hear about your organisation’s performance. Why wait when you can achieve more attention through blogging.

Engage Customer on your Site: – When you blog about your organisation you should provide services like comment, sharing to social media site so that your customers will have the opportunity to put forth their thoughts and you can engage them through questions, polling sessions etc.

Blogging increases SEO value: – Whatever you blog contains a title, this helps you when people type long tail keywords to find their answers, This might not help you more but you can stuff and target keywords into your title tag to get audience to your post and in turn increase traffic.

Blogs help increase Text Linking: – When you write content you can specify text linking to your internal pages or to your other advertisers and in return you can charge them for promoting their link on to your site for particular period of time.

Spread Awareness about Brand: – Blogging helps you to socialize with users over the Internet and build trust among your audience. It also helps to spread good things about your brand. Blogs are an opportunity to provide a less antiseptic view of your company that is more personal and less “corporate”. Blogs can humanize your brand.

Fresh Content = Better Website in Search Engine: – Blogging helps you to generate crawl visits to increase to your website. It’s better to have your website crawled very often by search engines, this builds trust with search robots and also helps to optimise your rank and increase awareness among large audience.

I hope (PYWOD’s blog post) has cleared a lot of doubts for corporate blogging.