Creating a Facebook Page for your business is a great way to market yourself on Facebook, extending your reach to Facebook’s ever-growing 500 million plus users. We introduced the topic of Facebook Pages in our Social Media Series a few weeks ago, so today we’ll talk more about what you can do with a Facebook Page, and how you can customize it to make your page really shine. Customization is really the key to making your page stand out among your competition and the countless number of pages available these days. There are a couple of great things you can do that we’ll cover today.

Facebook Statistics

As stated on the Facebook Statistics page:

• There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages)
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events

Your company’s page can be a part of that interaction! Create a page and get started.

Facebook Page Fun Facts

• Facebook Pages are often referred to as Fan Pages, because you used to hit “Become a Fan” instead of the “Like” button that you see today. Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Pages are the same though.
• Anyone with a Facebook profile can create a Facebook Page although you do need to check a button that says, “I’m the official representative of this person, business, band or product and have permission to create this Page.”
• Sharing and building your audience is built right into Facebook, since your fans automatically tell people about you when they join and interact on your page through the feed that goes straight to all their friends. This is one of the greatest benefits of creating a page, you can expand your reach and tell more people about your company by getting people to interact with you on a more personal level.

Customize Your Page

There are tons of ways to create a greater Facebook Page by adding some custom features.

New tabs

Facebook allows anyone to add any number of tabs that they want and there are tons of options out there. This is an easy way to customize your page, and everything that allows people to see more about you and encourages interaction is a great idea. Some of my favorite options (that require no special knowledge to implement) include:

• RSS feed: Bring your blog posts into a tab so anyone on Facebook can check them out.
• Twitter: Pull your tweets into a tab for your Facebook Fans.
• Poll: Create a poll that encourages discussion and interaction.
• Extended Info: Facebook limits you on the type of fields you can add information in, this gives you additional and unlimited fields.

These are just a few that I really like but there are tons of applications available for you to implement. Do some research and play around with what works best for your company. You can add galleries, podcasts, discussion threads, reviews, and the list goes on…

Custom tabs

With some coding knowledge you can now add even more, creating a really unique Facebook experience for your fans. Currently, you can customize your Facebook Pages with the Static FBML application. This application allows you to add just about anything in a tab, opening the possibilities for what you can do on Facebook. Some companies have created an entirely new site within Facebook, integrating e-commerce solutions, photo galleries, forms, flash banners, etc. FBML stands for Facebook Markup Language (see the documentation) and uses code that is slightly different than normal HTML, but is fairly easy to pick up with some research and HTML background knowledge.

However, Facebook plans to phase out FBML tabs soon, and will not allow any more new FBML tabs at the end of this year. They will allow anyone to keep current FBML tabs, but no new ones can be created. Custom tabs will have to be created using iframes. An iframe can bring any page into a frame on another page. This also will allow just about anything to be placed within your Facebook page, it will just be another method. Facebook keeps changing standards and methods that you can use on pages, and they have posted a roadmap that allows you to stay informed.

Great examples

Tons of large and small companies have created really unique Facebook Pages that encourage interaction with the company, pushing their message further. Check out some examples below.

As you can see there are tons of things you can do with your Facebook Page and it doesn’t need to be complex to be awesome. Push the boundaries. Create something truly amazing. Your fans will love it and hopefully share it with their friends, extending your reach and creating a bigger audience for your company.