Facebook is currently the king of the social network realm. Actually I should say it has become the king of the realm. Period. According to one report, Facebook accounts for almost one-fourth of page views and 10% of Internet visits and it is set to over take Google, in terms of web traffic.
With so many people playing on Facebook rather than reading your wonderful website, creating a Facebook page is more important than ever. Even if you seldom use Facebook, for many people now Facebook is the internet, so Facebook might just be the only way they ever see your site.
A Facebook fan page is like RSS for the masses. I have posted previously about how to set up an RSS Feed for your site. I love RSS for keeping track of sites I have subscribed to, but most people don’t even know what RSS is. I always ask my non internet-biz related friends what RSS is, and the usual response is a blank stare.
A Facebook page is easier to understand for most people. Someone “Likes” your page, and when you update your page this appears on their newsfeed. If they are interested they will click on the link and visit your site. So by creating a fanpage you have just taken a set of eyeballs away from the almighty Facebook, and sent them to your site instead.
Create a Facebook Page
To get started, login to your facebook account and go to Create a Page.
Select: Create a Page for a: Brand, product, or organization.
In the drop down menu, select “Website”, then name your page.
When you create a fan page the URL will look something like this:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Travel-Bloggers-Guide/127414583390
That’s an ugly URL there. Don’t worry, once you get 25 fans for your page you can then customize the URL, like this:
http://www.facebook.com/travelbloggersguide
Announce your new fan page to your friends and you should soon reach 25 fans. Once you have 25 fans, go to:
http://www.facebook.com/username/
From here go to “Set a username for your Pages”. Choose carefully as you can only do this once.
Set up automatic updates
Even if you don’t use Facebook often, you can set up you page so it updates whenever you have a new blog post.
For the travelbloggersguide page I use RSS Graffiti. Add this application to your page and it will automatically update your fanpage for you.
So there you go, you now have a your own page on Facebook. Be sure to “Like” me at http://www.facebook.com/travelbloggersguide.
Hi James,
Does the “Local/Travel” part of the website description automatically appear and/or can you add this after setup? I have noticed that you on ‘Nomadic Notes’ as well as other travel bloggers I follow all have the description “Local / Travel website”, but according to this article, only the description “website” would come up.
I have recently bought a new domain name, still in the beginning phases of setting it up as a travel blog, but I want to do everything right this time! And that includes running – another 😉 – Facebook site to keep it separated from my language and translation business.
Thanks for your help!