In our last blog post in this series we covered our recommendations on best practices for executing wall posts for your brand in Facebook. Today we’ll cover some key thoughts on how to structure your Facebook public profile and which features are expected by users today.
- Balanced Info. How much information and how many tabs should you have on your Facebook page? Just ask Goldilocks. You want enough information to keep your users engaged but not so much it’s information overload.
Example of Effective Tab Structure
- Boxes are so 2008. When Facebook launched major updates to Facebook pages a few months ago, a lot of the original content was relegated to the “Boxes” tab just like it was for personal profiles. Things were starting to get cluttered and disorienting on personal and brand pages, which is most likely why the switch was made. You can tell which brands haven’t updated their pages when you see a bunch of info on the Boxes tab, aka, the bucket of left over information from the days of infinite scrolling. Users expect intuitively named tabs so they know where they are going when browsing your page – not a bunch of random stuff in a Boxes tab.
- Vanity URLs. As most know by now, Facebook is now offering vanity URLs that help with recall and ultimately SEO (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/vitrue). Check out our earlier blog post for details.
- Exclusive Fan Offers. With a little know-how you can easily give special offers only to your Facebook fans. They love this kind of stuff. At Vitrue, we do this all the time for our clients. It’s a very powerful and simple way to build your fan-base.
- Custom Apps. Many brands develop custom Facebook solutions to engage with their customers on a level beyond the standard Facebook features to help differentiate from the competition. In many cases these custom solutions provide key viral discovery components, which share activities with friends via news feeds and notifications. These features help spread the word and keep users coming back for repeat visits.
If you’re new to setting up your public profile (e.g. brand page) to Facebook then don’t try to do everything at once. Build out a schedule for yourself and enable features as you become comfortable and can get a handle on how much effort is required for maintaining interaction with your fans. And remember, we’re well beyond web 2.0 and you want to keep things nice and clean so users can find what they are looking for easy breezy.
