I’ve been helping the wonderfully talented Sarah Bednar (disclosure: my fiance :)) with some ideas on how her non-profit, LifeCare Alliance, can use their Facebook Fan Page as one more productive business tool in their communications tool box.  She’s done a great job of building things up and getting people involved.

Watching her figure out how LifeCare will use their page has sparked an idea for a series of posts on the subject.  A lot of these ideas will come from strategies and tactics we used when building out the huber+co. page, along with some pages for other huber clients like the Arena District Athletic Club, the Columbus Marathon and others.  We’ll also look at some other pages done by local Columbus folks, as well as some larger companies investing time and energy in the context of Facebook.

Sound good?  Nice.  Let’s begin…

Why a Facebook Fan Page is a Good Idea for Your Organization
There are a ton of reasons why Facebook Fan Pages, when used well, can be so powerful.  Essentially, organizations can use Facebook to build large affinity groups, who are willing to receive content updates on a regular basis and can be motivated by those communications.

At the core, the concept of a Facebook Fan Page provides all the benefits of a traditional database marketing tool, but with the advantage of fostering open-forum, two-way communication between an organization and it’s audience.

One of the key benefits of Facebook Fan Pages lies in ease of conversion.  In it’s simplest form, conversion means asking someone to take an action, and having them actually do what you would like them to do.  We’ve been converting people on the web for a long time, from garnering email newsletter signups, to capturing leads via web forms.  In more recent years, conversion has moved into the human arena, using social media tools to enable relationship conversion – i.e., asking someone to become your friend or connection, and having that person accept the request.  Pretty basic stuff, but extremely powerful in terms of business application.

Conversion on Facebook is unique because the entire medium radiates a cultural context of know, like and trust.  For instance, it’s known that the vast majority of users only friend the people with whom they have some type of deeper offline relationship.  Therefore, it seems logical that if a request is sent within the context of Facebook, a higher degree of trust becomes associated with that request, and conversion rates are improved.

Second, there’s little to no barrier to conversion.  What I mean by this, is that once the user makes the decision to become a fan, the end result is only one click away.  Less clicks between the user and the final conversion usually results in higher conversion rates.  Compared to traditional conversion on web forms where a visitor might be asked to enter information such as an email address or phone number, clicking the “Become a Fan” button on Facebook is really no sweat.

Finally, users have nothing to loose by becoming a fan.  Becoming a fan of a Facebook page takes seconds, costs nothing, requires no submission of private information, and comes with no obligation for the user to engage with the page.

Next Up – Setting Clear Objectives of Your Facebook Fan Page
If you run a business or any type of organization, chances are you may have already opened up a Facebook Fan Page.  That’s a good first step and congrats on taking it.  Let’s work on the rest together.  You in?

The next step in playing the game is determining your objectives for the page, and more importantly, how you will measure success.

We’ll cover that next in the series, so stay tuned…

In the meantime, what other benefits can you think of that a Facebook Fan Page provides organizations?

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