How to Set Up a Facebook Fan Page

Last week I had the pleasure of going to BarkWorld Expo in Atlanta, Georgia. It was such a fun experience and I met so many great people. In case you haven’t guessed it from my blog already, I love animals and social media. While there, I was given a chance to talk about both. How cool is that?

Most of my anipal friends spend most of their time on Twitter. Twitter is great. It’s the ADHD of social media. It can go fast and furious. I met a lot of these pals at pawpawties thrown by mai pal frugaldougal.

It was a lot of fun to be able to introduce the folks to a whole other side of social media – Facebook fan pages. Some people have set up profiles for their pets. While this is perfectly acceptable on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, this in a no-no on Facebook. If they find out that your pup has a profile, they can remove the account. That’s bad news. One thing that you can do to get around it is to set up a fan page for your furry companion instead of a standard profile. That is totally kosher.

Here are some of the things that I talked about for setting up a fan page:

• You need to have a Facebook account. If you’re not a Facebook user, you need to create an account an account for yourself. You can either do it now or you’ll be given an opportunity while you create the fan page.
• You won’t be able to remove administrator rights from the account that starts the fan page. I assume this was done so that there would never be any orphaned fan pages. The person that sets up the page should be someone who will be with the company (or pet) for the long haul. When I helped my daughter’s friend Tzipporah set up her page for her designs, I made sure that she created it. After that she was able to add me as an administrator. I’ve heard of people contacting Facebook directly to have an admin removed, but who wants to go through that hassle?
• Go to Facebook’s homepage, and click on the “Create a Page” link under the login area
  
  If you are logged into Facebook already, you can go to any fan page and click the “Create a Page” link at the bottom of the left column.
• Now you need to make some decisions. The majority of the people that I spoke to wanted to create fan pages for their pets, so I demonstrated by choosing “Public Figure”. Be careful when you set this. Once it’s set it can’t be changed.
  Set the page name and click the “official representative” box. Then click “Create Official Page.”
• If you’re not already logged in or don’t have an account, do that now.
• This will bring you to your page and the “Getting Started” tab. You can always go back and modify this information, so you can be a little more relaxed about what you choose to share. Upload a picture and fill in the basic information. You can even set your facebook updates to update your twitter status if you like.
  
• One thing that the getting started tab doesn’t tell you to do is to fill in the information in the little box under the image.
  This is very important to do. Most users will see this information. It shows up on nearly all tabs – excluding discussion and pictures. Make sure to represent who you are. If you have a website to link to, make sure to put ‘http://” before the url. If you only put www.yoursite.com, the link will not be clickable.
• Next thing to do is edit the properties of the page. Click the “Edit Page” link right under your picture. If you want to restrict your page to certain country, or gender, you can do it in the “Settings” area. Go to the “Wall Settings” and look at the options for “Default View of Wall”. You’re probably going to want to change this to be “All Posts”. By default, the wall is set up to show just what the admins put up, and people need to click through to “Others” to see what fans put there. It’s considered good etiquette to set it to “All Posts.” Unless you’re someone huge, like Coca Cola, and are afraid that it will be hard for people to distinguish the difference between what you post and what your fans post, change it.
  The “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else” is what tab you want new users to see when they come to your page. After people Like your page, they will get the wall tab. If you set a Welcome tab or some other type of information, you’re probably going to want to change that setting.

That’s it. Your page is set and ready to go. You should let people know about it. To do that, you can create ads (I’ll cover that in another post) and share it with all your friends. An easy way to share is click the “Suggest to Friends” under the page picture.

If you have any questions about anything that I’ve covered here, let me know. I’m only a bark away. Have fun with your page!