• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

  • Author
  • Photos
  • Contact

facebook

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

by Melvin · Aug 30, 2010

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m trying to be active in Facebook once more, not with my personal account but with the blog’s fan page. So far it’s been good, slowly but surely I’m getting people to communicate with me through that medium.

Anyways, I set the fan page last year and even up to now, I am constantly getting asked on how I do it. I’d love to point to amazing and definitive guides like the one from Pat Flynn and some others. Pat has absolutely helped me set up mine by writing a Facebook Guide for Bloggers which is an extremely popular article.

Now the reason I’m doing this post is that I want my readers to have a place too, or just a reference just in case they want to set up a Facebook Fan Page for their blogs. Another is that Facebook has made some changes with the custom box and I believe most of the articles haven’t updated their guides yet so it’s good to have the latest one right? 😉

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page

First things first

I’ll go straight into the topic. To start creating a page, head on to the Create a Page page. You have three options there, you could create a fan page, a community page, or a Facebook group. In this what we’d like to do is create a fan page so click on the Fan Page section. Don’t worry creating a page is FREE to anyone.

Make sure you name your page carefully because it’s something that you can never change later on. So take your time in naming your page (usually it’s just the name of the blog as well), and double check if you typed it correctly.

You may also want to put in some status messages first. People don’t subscribe to a fan page that has empty interaction. I know its odd to put a status message when there’s no one following you yet but trust me this is what is needed. Plus, everyone does that initially.

Personalization

Now make sure you don’t become one of those millions of fan pages that create just a generic page for their brand. Facebook fan pages almost look the same but you can customize it by personalizing the way it looks. And you can do that by simply uploading images.

Upload your photo, make sure it’s something that would represent the brand of your blog. You could either place a custom logo image of your blog or simply just a pic of you. Do not also forget to write details like the tagline (the one that appears under the logo) and the info tab which would contain all the basic information about your fan page.  Again take time to write those information.

Lastly, create a custom box! A custom box is just basically a box that is outside the default “Wall” and “Info” boxes. The main use of this is you can create a custom landing page for your fan page. Here’s how mine looks:

MelvinBlog Fan Page

You could easily do that clicking on the + sign on tabs and adding a custom box. You can then name it and put content inside the box. The “in thing” however is the use of images. As you can see above, my landing page just consists of an image and a simple html text. Make sure to get your message clearly across your target audience. Do not also forget to ask them to LIKE your fan page.

To create an HTML, simply add the application Facebook Markup Language and you’re ready to go. Using it is as easy as using an HTML editor.

Little update that I’d like to emphasize is that Facebook has updated their terms when it comes to custom boxes. Before the maximum width for an image is 760px but Facebook has reduced it now to 520px. Make sure you comply with the settings or else the custom box would look ugly.

Finishing Touch

Now maybe you’re wondering, where is the custom box for? As I’ve written a lot in the past few months, I’ve always emphasized the importance of landing pages. With landing page, you can actually “convince” your potential readers more to do something that you want.

Now head on to the settings of your fan page and change the “Default Landing Tab” to your specific custom box. Now every visitor that goes into your fan page will land to that custom page where they will be more enticed to “like” your page as opposed to just landing to the default wall tab.

facebook default tab

As you can also notice, your url is pretty not personalized. That’s normal. As soon as you hit 25 fans, Facebook will give you the ability to change the vanity url of your page. Again, make sure you are sure with what you input as this is pretty much unchangeable.

Conclusion

Now you have a Facebook Fan Page for your blog. Utilizing a Fan page is like using Twitter except that there’s almost no limit. And since anyone uses Facebook more than Twitter, you could literally build a powerful community behind that communication medium which in turn can translate as traffic to your blog or vice versa.

But how do I get people to like my page? There are thousands of ways but the most clever way first and foremost is to initially contact your friends in Facebook and tell them politely to fan your fan page. It’s easy, if you have 50 friends, Im sure almost all of them wouldn’t mind “liking” your page.

Did I miss anything here? If you would like to add something or ask anything, feel free to write in the comment form.

Filed Under: Blog Tools, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Preachings, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: facebook, facebook fan page, melvinblog fan, set up fan page

Can We Connect More in Facebook?

by Melvin · Aug 15, 2010

Since having a job late last June, I took it as a challenge to maintain everything that I’ve been doing. I always think I’m a good darn multitasker and with that, every plan that I had prior to taking my job has still been the plan.

Obviously its getting tougher and tougher each week as I realized things are not as easy as I thought they would be. I’m sure you notice it that there were times that I couldn’t even publish a single blog post here or maybe respond to an email in a timely manner. Yes, having a day job is a huge time sink.

So it left me thinking what could I do to still maintain my connection with you, as my readers like I did before. Since it’s nearly impossible to pop out as much blog posts as I used to in the old days, I had an idea of being more into the social media scene.

Obviously I thought of Twitter. I mean, I tweet a lot of time, I have a thousand followers so maybe I can just tap into it and communicate with you more. Good idea but I realized something else.

Twitter is good but still it doesn’t really possess the “real-timeness” of Facebook. I mean how many times can you reply to someone, only to get a reply after a day or two? and then getting confused with the reply because  you already forgot you asked a question.

Since I brought up Facebook, then it’s a good idea to use it right? Facebook probably is the largest social network outside Twitter and people there spend more time than with the latter one. I have a Facebook account with a couple hundred followers but the problem is it’s used more to connect to friends and people here in my country. If you’re my friend there, I’m sure you see me say a lot of “Tagalog” words that you just don’t care at all because you don’t understand it in the first place. Most of my things there are just catered to my friends and relatives, not in a wider user base as for instance, my blog’s readers.

With that I realized, the fan page. Yes, the MelvinBlog Facebook Fan Page. The fan page started late last year and I even held a contest to populate my fans, lols. It started off good and nice, I was active there, some of the fans are replying on a daily basis and I’m also using it to gain more traffic back to the blog and vice versa.

I started automating things, connecting it with Twitter and my feed and eventually what happened is that it became stagnant. I mean who cares replying to an automated wall status message right? As days passed by, it started becoming more and more dull. The usual 3-4 replies I get in my wall messages turned to zero, zilch! My bad eh!

The Resurrection of my Fan Page

Yes, you guessed it right. I’m going to switch it back to its old setup and start being more active there. I know the fan page has been “dead” for the past 5 months but its time to resurrect it.

As I’ve said my plan with it is to use it more to communicate with you when times are hard (means busy days).  Just to give you an idea, here’s what you can do with my fan page:

  • Greet me hi or hello
  • Say I look good
  • Ask questions
  • Complain about something
  • Collaborate with your ideas
  • Spam your links 🙂
  • Beg for money
  • Shoot me with your funny pics
  • Tag me with your food for the moment
  • Use it as an email alternative
  • and super many more

As you can see, you can literally do anything by being hooked up in my fan page. And I can assure you that I’ll never let you down. Fortunately, surfing Facebook is 110% legal in our office so rest assure that we can then be closer with each other.

You may want to closely follow it since I’m having some brilliant contest ideas that I may throw just in that fan page. Its going to be really nice and fun out there as we can learn more about each other on a more personal scale. Be a fan of my blog now and let’s start connecting. =p

Filed Under: Announcements, Blogging Tips, Offtopic, Preachings, Ramblings, Social Media Tagged With: facebook, facebook fan page, melvinblog fan

Blogging And Facebook

by Melvin · Jul 19, 2009

Ok, we all know that (probably) all people who are aware that the internet exists do have their own facebook accounts. But not all are concerned on having their own blog. I’m all fine with that as I really don’t recommend blogging to everyone and it depends on one’s interest whether to enjoy it or not. Although blogging and facebook (alongside Twitter) seemed to be somehow connected with each other, we can all agree that both can be time-waster’s as well. Here’s my take on their advantages and disadvantages:

ADVANTAGE

The good advantage of having a facebook account and an own blog is that it already sets your own stage online. It gives exposure to who you are and what you do best. Some may think its retarded but the truth is when you meet people or when you are applying for a job or a position, a company will always do a Google search for your name to see who you really are, yep its so true! Having both accounts (or even just one) is already a big plus if you’re trying to carve out an online reputation for yourself (or even just a personal brand).

DISADVANTAGE

Ok, like the ones we’ve talked about lurking in forums a couple of weeks ago, both can also waste your time. Most people that have their own blog and do online business would waste it by ‘blog-hopping’ or maybe by caring too much about the looks, designs and metrics of it. While facebook on the other hand has a ton of applications/games embedded into it that could mesmerize one, hence it’s easy to get distracted, just enjoy it and neglect other responsibilities. Those who don’t have an online biz or stuffs can also ‘lurk’ in facebook too much (w/c is harmful as well). I have talked with a lot of my friends and they shared to me that facebook takes 90% of their time in the internet (by playing third-party games and taking stupid quizzes and stuffs). I really don’t have anything against it but if you’re a student or someone who does something , then probably you can be better doing your own stuff. Oh well, maybe just my 2 cents.

As for every online property, entity or whatever, they have their own disadvantage for their use. Sure facebook is fun and so is blogging but at the end, it’s not really hard to figure out whether either of them is hurting your productivity. Or maybe its just me. If you agree w/me then add me on Facebook. 😀

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Preachings, Traffic Tagged With: blogging, facebook

Copyright © 2021 · No Sidebar Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in