If your company's first home online is your firm's website, consider making its second home a Facebook page. The social networking site is beginning to see more traffic than Google – traffic that could be visiting your page and learning what your company has to offer. Want to get noticed there? Keep reading.
We'll start with the name of the page. If you have a personal Facebook page, you gave it your own name. The equivalent to this is using the actual name of your business. You may be tempted to put lots of keywords in addition to this in the name of your company's Facebook page; resist the temptation. Remember, people who hang out at social networking sites are usually there to see what their friends are up to, maybe play a few games, and maybe check out interesting links that show up in their friends feed. They're not interested in someone trying to sell them stuff, so if you come off as an aggressive salesperson or too spammy, they'll tune you out.
Not convinced yet? Then consider this: if someone is trying to find your page, they'll use your name. If someone is trying to find your company's page, they'll use your company's name. Why would you make it harder for someone who actually wants to find out what your company is up to on Facebook? Besides, it's not just the people who want to become your fans who are watching; it's Facebook itself. And Facebook takes a dim view of overly spammy page names. So keep it simple; use your business name.
On the same theme of making it easy for your fans to find you, you'll want to snag a “vanity URL.” Facebook opened these up to regular users a few months ago for their Facebook pages. It basically gave users the chance to claim their own name as their page's URL, as Lisa Barone did with facebook.com/lisabarone. Businesses can do that with their pages, too, as long as they have more than 25 fans. If you use your business name here, you'll make it easier for people looking for your company to guess where your page is located. It also boosts your brand by getting your company's name out there in another way.
If you've been promoting your business online for a while, you know all about landing pages and how important they can be to help visitors convert. Guess what? By using the Static FBML app, you can create your own custom landing page from your company's Facebook profile. This is where you can use keywords to give the search engines the right idea as to the topics and services for which your company is relevant.
The first step in setting this up is to add the Static FBML app to your page. Once you've installed it, you'll see a pop-over, which will ask you to pick the page to which you want to add the application. Click the “Add to Page” button to select the page. Now you only need to do some editing to create your landing page. It helps if you know a little HTML.
Now let's examine a couple of often-overlooked promotional opportunities on Facebook: the About box and the Info tab. What do you want to tell the search engines about your company, in 200 characters? Put that in the About box. Since it's one of the few areas of your Facebook profile that the search engines can actually reach, you don't want to leave it blank. The Info tab lets you add keyword-rich content to your profile that helps Facebook decide whether to show your page for certain searches, so you don't want to neglect it, either.
Finally, let's talk about links. They're important when promoting your business in the search engines; it shouldn't surprise you that they're also important when promoting your page on Facebook. One way you can do this is by increasing the number of fans you have. Another way you can do this is by going off-site. In other words, mention your Facebook page on your website, blog, other social sites, and encourage others to link to it. If you want to encourage links, of course, you need to be active on your company Facebook page in a way that inspires interest – but that's another topic for a different article.
Website Promotion 
