Selasa, 28 September 2010

Business Pages over the Facebook:The Boss of all Social Networking Sites

Facebook is huge. With the average user connecting to 80 community pages, groups and events and with over 900 million (!) objects that users love to interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages), Facebook pages are massive and with a well thought layout they will prove to be a very valuable business asset and a great experience for the user.

There are no clear design standards for Facebook pages, but there are good practices and that is what this article explores. The Holy Grail of Facebook page interaction is called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). FBML allows you to enter fully into Facebook World and build Facebook applications that deeply integrate into a user’s experience. You can hook into several Facebook integration points, including the profile, profile actions, and canvas. It allows you to create great things that will make your fan page prominent among others and provide some high value to fans.
This article takes a look at some highly effective and well developed Facebook pages and shows what can be built using FBML, just scroll down and see yourself:

Call to Action

No matter what your Facebook page is about, the purpose of your custom landing tab should always be conversion of visitors to your fans. Between a visitor and the fan there’s a tiny click on that “Like” button, and sometimes it’s a good practice to remind people about it. Here are some good examples on how to attract attention:

Redbull

Britney Spears

The Vampire Diaries

Fox News

BMW

Kleenex Brand

Incentive

Often it’s far not enough to just ask people to become your fans, you need to offer them something in return. There’s a cute FBML code to hide content from non-fans and show it when they click “Like” button. By using the code you can have people like your page just out of human curiosity. When you multiply this tip on creativity, here’s what you get:

Teesey Tees

Jeff Dunham

GAP

Playboy

Windows

Avon Products

Pages With Video

Does video have any effect on your visitors? The study by eyeviewdigital.com reveals the fact that using a video can increase your conversion to up to 80%. That’s really huge! So let’s take a look how successful companies and famous brands are using videos on their Facebook pages:

Twillight Saga

Oxelo

Cranium

Miley Cyrus

Guitar Hero

Inglorious Basterds

Budweiser UK

Sony

Car Manufacturers

While going through Facebook in a quest for cool custom FBML pages I’ve noticed that lot’s of well known car manufacturers have nicely designed Facebook pages. Some of which are pretty sophisticated ones. So I decided to combine them into a separate little section:

Porsche

VW

Mercedes Benz

Honda

Ford Explorer

Nissan

Buick

Cadillac

Random Well Designed Facebook Pages

If you don’t have an effective call to action, incentive or a great video – the last thing that will make people “like” your page is an impressive design. Today, if your Facebook page does not have a decent design – you are no longer interesting to anyone. Design it yourself (if you can), hire someone or purchase one of FBML templates, but please just don’t let your potential fans stare at your boring Wall. Look what you are missing: