Facebook is not only one of the most popular social media sites out there, it’s one of the most visited sites on the internet today. Tons of people use facebook for personal relations, and are unaware of how to use it for business. With millions of users to connect with, it can be a great marketing tool that’s inexpensive and useful for your company.

Check out this handy guide for some tips and ideas on how to set up a Fan Page for your company, what to post, and how to maintain it so that it’s useful and interesting for your users.

Facebook has some pretty staggering statistics:

• There are currently over 400 million users
• 50% of the active users log onto Facebook every day
• People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• The average user is connected to 60 pages, groups and events

If that’s not enough to make you want to get involved, I’m not sure what is! With all those people and demographics represented, your business could most likely benefit by participating.

Create a profile

Seems like an obvious first step, but if you already have a profile and it isn’t very professional, you should probably create a new one to use for business purposes. People will be able to find you through your company’s Fan Page so your profile should be representative of your company as well.

Create a Fan Page

Creating a fan page is pretty easy, click here and click on the button that says Create Page. Fill in details about your company, what kind of services you provide and upload some photos. On Snoack Studios’ Facebook Fan Page we have pictures of websites we’ve launched lately and other fun projects, to give users something to look at and see what we’ve done. Ultimately you want to lead users back to your website and contact you, so you need to give them enough information about who you are and what you do to click through.

Create a plan

Now how do you get people to come? Just creating a page is not enough to entice people to click the Like button. People want to interact on Facebook so you need to give them something to interact with! It’s best to come up with a plan before you start posting, just as you would with a marketing plan. Every time you post, it goes out to the feed of everyone that has clicked your like button. This is great for brand awareness by getting your company’s name out there often. You can post about upcoming events, company news, blog posts you’ve posted, relevant articles on your industry, etc. Also decide if you’ll let multiple people from your company post or if 1 person will be in charge of posting.

Keep it up

It’s important to stick with your plan and keep up with the posts. If you don’t post regularly, you aren’t getting the benefits of continual brand awareness and getting in front of your fans. When fans interact with your posts, it goes out to their friends on their feed, and the chain should hopefully continue to grow from there. More fans means your company name gets in front of more people, which only leads to more possibilities in business.

As I mentioned in our first social media series post, you need to decide where your audience is and how you can reach them best. Facebook has a pretty broad audience so check it out and decide if you could be using it to promote your company and reach more customers.