This is the first post in a series of posts about Facebook Fan pages. At this point, I hope you have come to understand that value of a Facebook Fan Page (also called a public profile, brand page, etc – but in my posts I will refer to them as “Fan Pages” or “Pages”). The purpose of this post is to show the various elements of a Fan Page and the various properties to those elements. I will use visuals and examples where needed. If you are keen to learn about Fan Pages but first need to learn the basics of Fan Pages, please spend a few moments reading Facebook’s Fan Page information.
Now that you have a basic understanding of Fan Pages and the basis of why they are important for successful brands, let’s jump into the various elements of a Fan Page. See the diagram below.
1. Profile Image: when you are on the wall or info tab, your profile image is viewed in its entirety. There is a trick that if you make the profile image 200px wide by 600px tall, it will leverage more screen real estate.
2. Side profile boxes: here the first thing that is displayed is a tagline box, basic information, your fans and then supplementary content that can be added from the boxes tab. The tagline box is a quasi status update as you can change it at any time but is designed to have more longevity. The basic information is an excerpt from the more robust info tab. The Fans section displays the total number of fans and a random selection of 6 fans.
3. Title, become a fan, and tabs: the title of your fan page in text form is listed right next to the “Become a Fan” button. This button is only visible for those who are not currently a fan or are logged out from Facebook. This is also the section where all of your visible tabs are displayed. Every Fan Page has a “Wall” and “Info” tab which can not be moved from their respective far left positioning. All other tabs in this section are able to be adjusted and modified.
4. The Wall or Stream: this is where the activity content of the fan page lives. Content here generally consists of content posted through the publisher (more on this in #6) or actions taken with the page outside the publisher, such as a new photo or video. The Fan Page admin has the option to toggle whether they want posts just by themselves or want to allow fans content to be posted into the wall as well.
5. Advertisements: Facebook has to make money and this is one of their prime sources to do so…ads. This section on the right is dedicated to delivering targeted ads. It cannot be moved or adjusted. If you are a fan page admin, you will probably see a fake ad for your own page. This is how Facebook is trying to convince you to buy ads to promote your page. Very clever but may trick you the first time you see it.
6. Publisher: as you can see in this chart, I am now a fan because the “Become a Fan” button is not longer visible and the Publisher is now visible. The Publisher is where Fan Page admins and the fans contribute content to a Fan Page. This content can be as simple as a text message or as complex as an embedded interactive Flash element. Once the content is shared through the Publisher, it appears in the stream. Fan Page admins can also modify what content their fans are able to share. For example here, Starbucks has decided that their fans should only share text, photos and videos.
7. 2nd-tier navigation: once you are beyond the Wall and Info tabs, the top of your Fan Page changes slightly. The profile image shrinks down to a 50px by 50px icon. This icon is a section of the full size profile image that can be selected when editing the profile image.
8. Additional content and applications: the structure and content of the Wall and Info tabs follow a very consistent protocol set forth by Facebook. Once you are outside of those two tabs, the variety of content grows immensely. You can have custom content through various applications that display a plethora of content (ie photos, videos, calendars, discussion boards) and also create your own type of content through something called FBML – Facebook Markup Language. See this tutorial video to learn how to use FBML to add a sprout to your Facebook Fan Page.
You now know the basic elements of a Facebook Fan Page. Using the resources provided by Facebook to get started and the information I have listed here in my post, you should be well on your way to mastering how to leverage your Facebook Fan Page.
We’re finding our fan page of little value due to oddities with the pages and problems with the APIs. The fact that you can’t invite a page’s fans to an event (only your personal friends). Is odd.
The fact you can’t do so through the API is outright bizarre. The fact you can’t send your fans a message through the API is frustrating beyond belief. They recently let you get a list of your fans through the API, but you can’t actually do anything with that list from what I can tell.
I don’t understand what I can provide my patrons by becoming my fan, other than short status updates.
Nice! Thanks for the tutorial. This will help me define the elements of a fan page more easily for folks at work.
@Tim I’ve also found some of the same things peculiar. I think it’s because Facebook wants you to pay to promote your event invites and advertise things the apge is trying to promote while leaving room for pages to participate and real engagement. One thing I’d like to see is the ability to read or comment the news feed of your fans. I became a fan of Google and I know this isn’t myspace, but I’d be amped if Google commented on my wall. If fan pages got to spammy with the comments coming from fan pages, users could just turn off comments from the page or even send feedback to the fan owner about it somehow. You can however send a message to all fans or segment by gender, state, city and age of the page or all at once but that’s it.
With that said, it forces a fan page owner to understand that if you want to be successful it has to be around frequent updates and engaging content; the more engaging the more fans will interact and spur WOM spread of the content, rather than push messaging. They make that clear by providing that post quality score metric.
I think Facebook could easily allow fan page owners to message and promote events easier by enabling the features and letting fans check off what types of messaging they want to receive from the fan page or want they want to turn off notification on. They could also let fans thumbs up or thumbs down messages and invites like they do with ads and assign the fan page another score for that so the fans can let the page owners know what works and what is too pushy or frequent.
It’s awesome that they opened up tagging in status updates and added real time search which will spur more velocity and WOM engagement with content so I’d like to see them add some metrics behind that and tighten up the search tool to include exact phrases, alerts for keyword mentions, an RSS feed and an export to .csv type of report for that. Nonetheless, with FB real time search it adds a giant missing piece to the listening pie but now we need new metrics to go along with the feature.
Dig the article. We don’t do the 600px tall very often, as there’s often content below the profile pic that’s important. But, with that said, we’ve taken pride over the last year or two making page profile pics look great (especially before status updates were available, locking in the pixels from the top of the page). So, here’s what we’d like to offer up. Our new favorite way to make a page’s profile pic look embedded within a page – no matter what. Download our background and place your content within it. It’ll make your page look sharp! See one of our client’s page at http://bit.ly/p3ShI. Super clean – every time. Get the background at http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/172684/fb_profile.jpg. Enjoy and cheers. Love me some Sprout-ness!
Wow. What a fantastic breakdown. I look forward to reading more of your blog! Thank you!
@Joey: Great intro to FB Pages!
@Tim: I just checked your LoadedGunTheory website and what you’re doing is great! But what’s more relevant here is that Facebook Pages are beyond-imagination-PERFECT for LGT.
1. FB Pages give you direct access to your fan’s newsfeed. That’s enormous. You can send them info/photos/etc that they comment/like and spread the word about you organically.
2. You’re not doing photos…and I’m sure you have a lot of actor, backstage, previous production photos you can share. FB is a ‘face/photo’ oriented platform – leverage that and you’ll find great success.
3. You can build a ‘Community of Fan-atics’ – who not only come to your shows but also bring their friends, parents and their neighbor’s dog.
Engage them in a process of co-creation…ask them to suggest names for a one-liner you share with them. Or do a quiz and give away free tickets. Etc etc. ENGAGE and win big!
4. To promote a specific event, you can do event-focused updates with photos, questions, links to where they can get tickets, etc.
I have become a fan of your page, and would love to see you get more active on FB. Goodluck!
good post, but no mention that it’s possible to tag Fans in status updates? (is a very powerful feature, imo)
@mark I just tested the mentions feature from the Sprout Facebook fan page my friends came up dynamically after typing the “@” symbol but once I shared it the mentions did not link. Facebook is going to need to fix that.
Hi! I’m running into a serious problem with my Fans page: my messages to Fans don’t get through!! I’ve been sending a couple of messages over the 3 months, and none of them made it. Any idea? We’re about to launch and it would be kinda crucial to let our fans know….
Thanks!
I created a Facebook fan page, but no one can see it except me.
I sent a “Suggest To A Friend”….to my friend…didn’t ever get it. Sent a link in an email to my fan page….took my friend to my main “news feed” page. I redid my mini-bio on my regular Facebook page with a link to my fan page….took my friend to my main “news feed” page.
I checked and it is marked as published.
What is going on? I did recently read that your fan page gets indexed. Would that be the problem. Until it gets indexed…no one can see it?
Was wondering if anyone can answer this: When I administrate a facebook page, it´s not possible for me to comment on the pages stream as myself/with my own profile name…any suggestions?
@Joey:
it´s been bit more than one month that we created our volleyball club page on FB.
Till recently one could see the “Become a Fan” button right next of our page title (Ilisiakos womens volleyball).
To be sure, i checked it out through different browsers and offcourse logged out.
Since FB settings are new for us and we have been trying its possibilities, i wonder if by mistake i changed something critical, resulting to the non-appearing of the “become a fan” button anymore.
Any assistance much appreciated.
Thanks
ilias
Big problem with the lack of Page Event Invites via email.
Facebook Page Admins: Please join this group to request an “Invite Fans
to this Event” feature!
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=147131748058
Hey @Karina, I run into this problem as well when administrating Facebook Fan Pages. The only work-around I have seen, is by creating a special business account specifically for your Fan Page and then logging in to your personal account when you want to comment as yourself. See this link for more info on business accounts > http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=721
@Susan unfortunately, I don’t have any additional information for you on this one. My first inclination was that it wasn’t published live. I recommend that you send an email to Facebook support. http://www.facebook.com/help.php
Hey Christine, are you referring to fan updates? I know that fan page admins are actually able to send messages (the kind that show up in your inbox) to fans. If your updates aren’t appearing in your fans “update” section…then that must be an issue with Facebook and they are probably working on fixing it.
@ilias I hope this problem has resolved itself because this is what I see when I go to your Facebook Fan Page > http://screencast.com/t/trLoABs6
[...] Dissecting a Facebook Fan Page [...]
[...] Dissecting a Facebook Fan Page [...]
If I am a “fan” of a certian page…can that page’s Admin enter my page and see my information (as if they were a friend)? If so, is there any setting to control that?
Thanks!
Hey, no, fan page admins are unable to see profile information of their fans. You must become friends for profiles to be visible in either direction. Facebook should be rolling out new security settings shortly so I would keep a close eye on this.
I was curious if anyone knew of a way to contact a fan page’s owner? The only way I’ve figured out is to scroll the the “See All Fans” link until you come to the end and assume the first fan is the owner. Anyone know a quicker method? Thanks!
Hey Josh, I wouldn’t trust that method. A friend of mine has created a fan page and he is not the last (first) when you scroll down the list.
Another thing: I was wondering about the rule Facebook has against managing multiple accounts… Any experience/thoughts on that one? Maybe I misunderstood but apparently it’s not allowed to manage both a personal account and a business account. Right?