Creating an engaging Facebook Fan Page can definitely help your business be more visible to your market. Being visible leads to the opportunity to become both credible and remarkable – based on your level of engagement and interaction. These three elements taken together are keys to your social media marketing success. Think of them as a 3-legged stool. When you have all 3 in place you’re on a solid foundation.

If you’re a small-medium size business the know-how and where-with-all to setup a Facebook Fan (Business) Page may have escaped you. Or, as a local business owner/manager in the 50+ (Baby Boomer) generation having not grown up in the computing and Internet worlds you could be, well, a little lost and perplexed on where to start. No worries. I’ve got some resources for you to sink your mouse into.

Getting Ready to Build Your Facebook Fan Page

But hold on there – first things first. I like what Bernie Borges of Find and Convert had to say recently in his Optimize This blog post titled, Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy: ”I want marketers to avoid making the most common mistake, which is the mindset that you need a Twitter or Facebook strategy. You don’t. You need a social media marketing strategy!”

Just because there’s over 300 million active users on Facebook and the search engines index the content on Facebook Fan Pages, and that you could use Facebook’s advertising to drive targeted traffic to your Fan Page…doesn’t  mean you should jump right in with creating your business Fan Page. Having a strategy and game plan is important before you start. I firmly believe in putting the why before the how. It’s one of the key things I do with clients who are interested in starting up a blog, Twitter account or Facebook Fan Page.

Establishing a Social Media Marketing Plan

Planning to understand your market persona and how they’re engaged in social media is part of the preparation process. You should also understand what you have to offer in terms of creative and digital assets and other forms of content; and how you will humanize your brand. All of this along with setting objectives, strategies and tactics will go along way toward achieving your goals for social media marketing. Perhaps your main goal is to generate greater awareness for your products/services, grow market share or create competitive separation points.  Put together a plan before you start creating that Fan Page. Here’s some key points to consider:

A social media marketing plan includes:

• Goal: What you want to  improve, enhance, increase, etc, (have just one goal per plan).
• Objective: Specific outcome related to target audience, expected level of achievement and time frame.
• Strategies: Definition of the approaches focused on to attain the objectives and reach your goal.
• Tactics: The activities, tools and methodologies to support each strategy.

Example social media marketing plan:

• Goal: Increase awareness of (name of) services.
• Objective:  Gain 500 new visitors to blog/website within 3 months.
• Strategy 1: Create a Twitter account
  • Tactic 1: Conversational tweets (5 per day)
  • Tactic 2: Informational tweets (5 per day)
  • Tactic 3: Service update tweets (1 per day)
  • Tactic 4: Promote new blog posts (2x per week)
• Strategy 2: Create an engaging Facebook Fan Page
  • Tactic 1: Link Twitter feed
  • Tactic 2: Import blog feed
  • Tactic 3: Facebook Social Ads
  • Tactic 4: Use Photo Album/Videos to tell our story

Hopefully, that will give you an idea of how to go about establishing a social media marketing plan and some of the key elements to include. You don’t have to make it overly detailed, or feel like you have to learn everything there is to know. The plan is a guide to get you started down the right path. As you get into the implementation of your plan you’ll learn by doing and uncover opportunities to tweak or change up the  strategies and tactics.

Now, with a defined tactical direction to create an engaging Facebook Fan Page to support your objective and goal,  you’re ready to get started with the setup.

A Facebook Fan Page Prep Guide

In the process of building  my own Facebook Fan Page for Zephyr Marketing I discovered there are a few things to think about and make decisions on before you get to the actual setup process. First, of course you must have created a Facebook Personal Profile. If not, get on over to http://www.facebook.com and create one. The key items you then want to prepare before getting in to the Fan Page setup are:

• Decide on a name for your Fan Page
• Pick a category and business type
• Select and prepare your main profile picture

Rather than lay out all the considerations and steps of defining these points in a blog post, I’ve created a Facebook Fan Page Prep Guide in PDF format free for you to download.  I hope you find it useful and will come back and share any questions, comments or other suggestions. Click the image above to download.

Next, I will share with you my eBook, How to Create a Facebook Business Page. It will be released and posted within the next day or so on this blog. The Fan Page Setup eBook is a 20+ page eBook on all of the important steps to setup and get your Facebook Fan Page rolling, including how to import your blog to your Fan Page. You may want to subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss it.