Glend Article

Making Money With Facebook - Chapter 7: ‘Pages’ & ‘Beacon’

Author: glend

Pages

Going right back to the first screen of creating our ‘Social Ads’, you may recall that you were presented with the option of sending a visitor to pages of a website that is outside of Facebook or creating a new ‘Page’ on the site.

Creating such a ‘Page’ is a free service that allows you to create a one page mini-site about your business. It is essentially a full one page advert for your business.

When you first visit this ‘Pages’ page, you will immediately see that there are three drop down menu boxes at the top of the page.

The first of these boxes is for listing a ‘real word’ business on a local basis, so the drop down shows all of the different types of business that you can list (Automotive, Banking, Café, Grocery etc).

The next drop down lists businesses by product or service.

One of the categories listed in this second ‘drop down’ is ‘Online Store’ which I suggest that most smart internet marketers could ‘fit’ their business into!

Remember that this is free publicity and advertising, so it will certainly merit making a little bit of effort to take advantage of this resource.

So, I would recommend that you should use this category listing, and create your own page, but that you try to build it with as ‘passive’ a voice as you can.

In other words, try to make your online store a place that is attractive enough to entice visitors in, rather than shouting at them that they must visit you.

As we have already established, this latter approach is almost certainly doomed to failure in the Facebook community!
So, give your Online Store a suitable name and then proceed with the creation of our page.

Now, the way that your store can become most effective is by becoming a place where people want to return to again and again. Thus, you need to make it as interesting, engaging and exciting as possible, and you can do this by adding extra ‘applications’ to your Page, things like videos, pictures, flash content, reviews and so on.

Once your Page is created, then the idea is that you should try to attract as many Facebook members as possible to interact with it.

You could, for example, use Social Ads to bring people to your Page. And, once they are there, your visitors can tell you that they have enjoyed the experience by adding messages to your Page on what is known as ’the Wall’, or they can join as a fan, add their own pictures to the Page or join other groups that are represented on the page in discussion.

The bottom line is that every person whom you can entice into interacting with your site will then have their interactions reported to other folks who have already added their own interest to your Page.

In addition, everything that you do will also be notified to all of these people too, so, eventually, there should be a constant and relatively never ending ‘swirl’ of information circulating through a whole group of people that is effectively centered on your store!

Now, this is a great theory, of course, but you have to get people to ‘join’ your group in the first place, and that is probably the hardest job to do!

And, guess what?

There has never been a better time to start building your page than right now, so you should take action immediately!
Firstly, at the time of writing, creating such pages is still a relatively new Facebook feature. Thus, there are just not that many completed Pages out there.

This also means that Facebook members have not yet started to suffer from the somewhat inevitable ‘Page blindness’ in the way that they possibly will do a few months or a couple of years down the road.

Second, the same fact means that there are very few Page based groups established yet. Be one of the first to really tackle this, and you could build a large and loyal following before anyone else has even realized that it is possible to do so.

Once these folks have already become your ‘loyal’ followers, it will not matter a great deal if the Facebook community does indeed become ‘Page blind’. You have already made your mark, and carved your place in the market.

So, the bottom line is that there has never been, nor will there ever be a better time to start to build and promote your Facebook Page than right now!

Beacon

The Beacon facility allows you to decide what actions of a visitor to your site are worthy of reporting to other site followers.

So, this could be something like making a product purchase from your store, adding an item to a wish list or maybe signing up for some free service.

Basically, you decide what levels or types of engagement a site visitor needs to undertake or achieve for this information to be published to your whole user group.

Now, when Facebook first introduced the Beacon resource or toll, it caused national Press outrage, as Facebook had not included any way that the user could control the information that was sent out about them (and perhaps their purchase, for example) to a network of people, many of whom they had never met or even heard of!

Introducing the Beacon service in this format was, not surprisingly, a hugely controversial step by Facebook, as most users whose details were spread all over the Facebook site without their knowledge quite sensibly saw this as a gross violation of their right to online privacy.

It should therefore be little surprise that the adverse national Press (and international online) coverage that it received soon had Facebook changing the ‘Beacon’ operating rules!

Now, the user receives a notification that certain information about their actions is to be disseminated, and they have the power of veto over such actions.

Given Facebook’s undoubted faux pas and the attendant adverse coverage that it received, it is perhaps no shock to know that the Beacon service is still not all that popular!

Nevertheless, once the hullabaloo has died down, there is no reason to assume that the Beacon service cannot form a valid and valuable addition to your efforts to spread your message.

Try to ignore the fact that Beacon is not that popular at the moment, and take a longer term view. Begin to embrace the service sooner rather than later would be my advice!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Work At Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.