Facebook is always trying to find new ways to allow you to express your individual brand identity, but still do it within the context of the established Facebook theme.  Fan pages are a great example of this.  Facebook has recently revised the way that they handle business pages.  You can set up a Fan Page for anything – a corporation, a small business, side projects, non-profits, individual products, bands, clubs, or whatever.  If you want something to have a presence on Facebook, then you can make a page for it.  The new Fan Page format requires that you have at least one Facebook individual account registered as the admin.  But you can have multiple admins attached to the same page.  The value of this when marketing your business is that you can leverage your personal connections to draw new traffic to your fan page.  You can post new content to just your personal profile, to just your fan page or both at the same time.  By dividing your Facebook identities in this manner, it allows you to keep your personal and professional worlds separate.

Facebook offers you standard tabs like ‘info’, ‘wall’, ‘discussions’ and many others.  But another cool thing you can do is create custom tabs that support full html design and layout.  You can use this custom tab to create a ‘Welcome’ landing tab for new visitors.  The trick is that Facebook won’t host the files your landing tab requires.  So all files need to live on another FTP site that you own, and the <hrefs> need to call the content in from that external host. With one click, you can easily set up your landing tab so that people that have already ‘liked’ your fanpage will land on your ‘Wall, but people who are new to your fanpage will arrive on your custom welcome tab.  You can use this entry portal to try and convince your visitors to ‘like’ your page either by offering incentives or just by asking very nicely.

Check out the Forge Media Fan Page and ‘like’ us to become part of our social network.  Let us know if you need help setting up your Facebook Fan page or creating a custom tab – we can help.