Fan Page

The challenge of increasing Facebook fan page visibility

Back in the fall of 2012, Facebook announced that they were going to add page notifications and a pages feed to everyone’s personal profile. I was pretty excited about this development when it happened, but ultimately, there are very few pages I want to receive notifications from. I was more excited about the pages feed, but I realized recently that I haven’t even looked at it since the first few days after the announcement. Have you?

When I realized that, I jumped on Facebook to take a look. Yep, it was still there. Just waiting for my attention. And I’ll make a conscious effort to have a look at it now. Then I found a really wonderful little feed right below it. It’s called the Like Pages feed. There’s always been a place like this, but it wasn’t so readily available. I somehow missed when this one went live. I was impressed with the pages presented to me. They were definitely related to content I’m interested in and I immediately liked about 20 pages from the list.

That leads to another interesting change: Facebook has started displaying a list of page recommendations when you’re on a page and click like. The algorithm may not be perfect, but the idea is interesting.

My first thought when I saw this was that Facebook could monetize this and allow businesses to buy recommendation spots, much like AdWords. Like every other step toward monetizing their service, it would certainly be controversial.

Either way, it’s good to see that Facebook is continuing to give pages various options for improving their visibility in a space where the competition for eyeballs keeps growing exponentially.

What is your biggest challenge with reaching your audience on Facebook?

Fantastic Fanpages: Volkswagen Netherlands

Every once in awhile I see a Facebook/social media campaign that blows my socks off and this one by Volkswagen in the Netherlands really does!



Why do I think this campaign is so amazing (other than the fact that it’s different and fun)?

1) They are totally speaking to their audience on Facebook and making something fun and gimmicky for them.

2) The contest requires at least 20K likes on one model which means you are compelled to invite and share with friends.

3) They given you an incentive to keep coming back to check on how the contest is going.

What’s more… I visited the Volkswagen Netherlands page and they do a really fun job on a regular basis! Check out their most recent photos:


They clearly make a regular effort to reach out to what’s going on with their fans - a volkswagen inspired pumpkin carving and a volkswagen ready for movember.  I LOVE IT!

Let’s for a minute compare how Volkswagen Netherland’s page looks to some of their counterparts:



And now Volkswagen USA



And Volkswagen Canada



zzzzzz

They aren’t bad pages, but in comparison to their European counterpart, they just aren’t doing anything amazing.  I thought it particularly interesting to compare the same brand and how different management can makes such a different impact on your audience.

What do you think? Are you impressed with Volkswagen Netherland’s Facebook presence?

 

Building an easy and free Facebook Fan page



Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru... Image via CrunchBase


You know those awesome looking Facebook fan pages - the ones the big companies have with the fabulous graphics and special offers?

I like those. I wanted one of those. I am NOT a coder.

I started hearing about some companies that were providing the service of helping you easily set up pages like those so I started investigating. I found two that were easy to use and that had free options:  Pagemodo and iFrame Engine.

Both were pretty easy to use, but Pagemodo came out a bit ahead for me. I didn’t spend extensive amounts of time trying to figure them out, so you get my “I don’t have time to waste on figuring this out” review on both of these :)

Pagemodo

Here is the page I created with Pagemodo.

How it works:

You can pick for about 8 free templates.  With a paid account you can get more functionality (like video) as well as more pages (the free account will only let you have one page and it has a fair amount of pagemodo advertising on it.) What I wished it had was the ability to make some of the links clickable and the zooming in and out of the images seemed to make them blurry.

I made a video of how to build the page here: Building a pagemodo page

iFrame Engine

Here is the page I created with iFrame Engine

This app doesn’t seem to have the same kind of templates to choose from so you build your page from scratch and it doesn’t seem to be as easy to have multiple boxes on one page.  It does have a reveal page function which is cool though - a page you upload that covers the regular content until someone likes your page.  I think this functionality would be be very useful if you have special content you were promising to only Facebook fans.

I couldn’t figure out how to have the page not be called iFrame Engine which was a definite down point for me.

Here’s the video of me building a page in iFrame Engine.

What do you think? Would you use a service like this? Have you? Would you pay for one?