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I’ve been doing some experiments lately. A lot of them with Facebook Pages. With the ads becoming more and more expensive, and my phasing out of more short term campaigns instead for more consistent, long term revenue generating projects, Facebook Pages makes sense. They give me a place to engage a very targetted audience, get free publicity on top of my ads through likes and shares, and ad costs are generally decreased (most likely because Facebook likes it when you pay them to send traffic to their own site).

So we’re going to talk a little outside the norm today with some simple Facebook Page techniques you can use to start building your own long term communities.

Page Name

Simple as it may sound this is the first thing that you should consider since the name will be the one that appears in search engines when someone makes a search. Make sure to choose a name that reflects your business or product. If I have a gaming blog I am trying to promote, instead of using some strange name like Kotaku, I’d include the words Video Game somewhere in the Page name as well. If people are search for pages about video games, they’ll find my page without having to search for the exact name in Facebook.

Cover Image

Facebook Timeline is here whether you like it or not. One good thing about this new feature is that you can have a large cover image for your brand to greet your page visitors. Your cover photo should capture the essence of your business and have a size of 851pixels x 315 pixels. Don’t just make any photo your cover photo but instead choose quality images that are well composed and have attention grabbing colors.

Profile Picture

The profile picture should work hand in hand with your cover photo. You should make sure that the transition is seamless and that it blends in perfectly. You are only allowed an image size of 180 pixels x 180 pixels for this so be sure to make it count. Below are some excellent sample Timeline cover designs and their profile pictures from popular brands.

About Section

Pack in as much information as you can in this section regarding your business or product. Some of the important things to include are your website, contact information and a brief history. This way, people who may want to contact you or find out more about your page can find the information in this section. This is also a great place for people to jump to your main site.

Contests and Giveaways

In order for you to grow your fan base you should have an incentive for people to like your page. One way to do this is to hold contests and giveaway prizes. It’s a great marketing strategy and on several occasions has grown my page likes from 13 to 2000+

Update Regularly

Now that you have the basics covered what you have to do is to provide constant updates to your fans. Answer any questions that they may post and try to provide a much more personal experience as possible. Try to make a status update at least once a day.

Obtain Celebrity Endorsements

This isn’t always an easy goal and is more of a bonus. I’ve gotten lucky a few times here in Thailand, as it’s easier to mix and mingle with those with celebrity status than it is in America. As an experiment, I had one of my more famous friends share a video of me speaking Thai on her page. She also linked my Page. Within 10 minutes I had 1000 fans. After 1 hour I had about 3000. I never did much with the page, but it was a fun social experiment to see just how many people would like a page about something relatively unimportant or special.