What Makes A Good Facebook Fan Page?

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso

I wanted to understand how to create a top fan page on Facebook and so I began investigating many of the biggest brands and their pages and searching for a commonality between them that helped turn them into pages with hundreds of thousands active fans. Since many of us do not have the brand power of the Coca-Cola’s, Linkin Park’s, Skittles and the NHL we can’t simply flick a switch and attract the fan count that these massive brands possess, instead what we can do is study and analyze what they do to create a compelling fan page.

Each one of these brands have the resources in place to hire top end developers and social media consultants and so we can learn a lot by what they have already paid others to do. While looking at these top brands I found seven things that each of them had in common and in the spirit of Picasso let’s steal their ideas to launch or improve on our own pages.

1. Customized Tabs – In order to set your Facebook page apart from the rest of them in your market look at creating a customized Tab for your page. The tab you create can use either the Static FBML application or could be a custom application. A custom Facebook application could cost you thousands but if you can code html you should be able to use the Static FBML application. In order to decide if you need to use the Static FBML application or have a custom application built you will need to decide if you need to access user data. If you don’t need to access user data use the static FBML application. For examples of customized tabs in action look at the fan pages for Pizza Hut, NHL, NFL, Lady Gaga, Coca-Cola and Oreo.
2. A Custom Landing Tab – Instead of pointing potential fans of your to the fall send them to a custom landing tab. Facebook makes this relatively easy to set up when logged in and you are the admin of the page.
   • At your Page’s Wall Tab click the “Settings” link underneath the “What’s on your mind?” box
   • Where it says “Default landing tab for everyone else:” choose the default landing tab that you want non-fans of your page to start on from the drop down menu

By setting the default landing tab to non-fans of you page you can layout call to action for them urging them to join as a fan or sign up for your newsletter or give them unique content that gets them to sign up as a fan. For examples of custom landing tabs look at: Nascar, Linkin Park and Dominos Pizza.

3. Interactivity – If you want to keep your fans or want to make new fans make sure to include some sort of interactivity on the site besides the Wall. Try including a poll, a game or allow your fans to give virtual gifts to their friends. Look to the NHL and Coca-Cola for examples of this.
4. Special Offers – When all else fails a little bribery never hurt. Try enticing users to become fans of your page through the use of promos and special offers only available to fans. Skittles does this by offering a buy one get one offer for all of their fans.
5. Social interaction – Facebook is a social network and in order to be successful you and your brand are going to have to be social. Don’t leave your Wall go unused and don’t let users fill your wall up with unanswered questions. Try and leave at least one wall post a day and try and ensure you answer any and all questions or complaints that appear on your wall. By using your Wall more often you are also encouraging interaction between your fans. The NHL, NFL and Skittles are all brands that use their Walls on a near daily basis and this constant use also shows in the amount of comments and likes each wall post gets from their fans.
6. Default view for wall set to show only page posts – As with most things on the internet that allow user interaction spam is inevitable and that includes spam on your Facebook Wall. To prevent some of the unsightly spam links from polluting your wall and giving potential new users a bad first impression you can set the initial view of your wall to display on page posts. To accomplish this you can do the following:
   • At your Page’s Wall Tab click the “Settings” link underneath the “What’s on your mind?” box
   • Where it says “Default view for wall:” choose “Only posts by page”

To see examples of why it might be best to initially show only posts from the page take a look at the Pizza and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen pages. At first glance there appears to be a lot of interaction on the page but upon further investigation you can see a lot of the “fans” are actually here to drop links to their own pages, websites and videos and are offering nothing back to the brand in regards to brand interaction. If you choose to hide this you will then be only displaying your approved messages while still offering a place (albeit slightly less visible) for the spammers to troll.

7. Events – Offer your fans a place or activity to meet and connect with your brand offline. Perhaps you could throw a launch party or a customer appreciation party. Starbucks is currently running a bold coffee promotion and their Facebook page lists which coffee blends will be available in which weeks, Coca-Cola is showing concert listings and Skittles ran a Valentines promotion. Events are another form of interaction that can help you get new fans and keep current ones.

Many of the items on this list could take you as little as minutes to complete while others may require a designer and coder and others yet require your daily time but by borrowing and incorporating the ideas put forth by the major brands into your own fan page your brand should be able to increase its fan count and fan interaction.

If you found this article to be of any use to you please consider sharing it with your own network of Facebook friends of Twitter followers by clicking one of the buttons below. Please leave a comment below with your list of favorite fan pages or let me know any of the things you have tried to attract new fans to your pages.