So you have a Facebook account for your company and you have friends on there, what next? Facebook allows you to create a fan page where you can dedicate this page to anything from a specific product to the entire brand and within this page you can create a custom looking Facebook page which can have a lot of functionality from your company’s website including links to products and sales pages. Once you have the page created you can collect fans which does not require that you know the people like it does when you add friends. This expands the potential customer base significantly, so I recommend that every business has a fan page setup.

In this article, our Chicago social media consultants at Operation Technology will walk through creating this Facebook Fan page, step by step. I have to note though that as Facebook updates their site and applications, the information in this article may become outdated but the main idea and basic setup should still apply and I am sure you will be able to find the current information simply by searching Google.

Ok, let’s begin.

First thing you need to do is log into your Facebook account and click on the “Ads and Pages” button in the left sidebar. Then click “Pages”:

On the next page you will see a page setup form. It’s pretty simple so just fill out the appropriate fields. You can check the check box at the bottom to hide the page from public viewing until you are done setting it all up. See image below:

At this point the page is setup. Now we need to configure all the options and customize the page. First we’ll upload a logo or an avatar for this page. Hover your mouse over the “question mark” image at the top left of the page, and click on “Change Image”, then click “Upload a Picture”. Browse your computer and upload your picture. See image below.

Next, click on the “Info” tab and then click “Edit Information” on the top right. Fill in the basic information and then the detailed information. Once that’s done, click “Done Editing”. Now click inside the box in the left sidebar that says “Write something about …” and write something about your company, keep it short, no more than two sentences but I’d stick to one.

At this point you can start uploading photos and start writing content in the “Notes” section. Click the “Apps” icon on the left side within the “Edit Page” section and select “Notes” and then click “Write A Note” button. You can keep adding new notes there as many as you want. Also explore the other applications that are available in the “Apps” section.

To take this a step further in customizing your page you can create a custom tab (page). This page will accept HTML / CSS so you can pretty much design the look of it to be whatever you want it to be. You can also add images by uploading them to your own host or an image hosting service somewhere else (Flickr) and then pull them from there.

Here is what we did for our Chicago social media Operation Technology Facebook business page

In the search box at the top of the Facebook page type in “FBML” (without the quotes) and hit “Enter” key. You will see a search result of “Static FBML” Click the link that says “Add to my Page”.

The next window will display a list of the pages that you have created and will let you install this application to any of them, so here click the “Add to Page” button next to the page that you want to install this application to and click “Close”.

After you add the FBML Application to your page you will need to navigate back to your page, click the Facebook logo to go back to your Facebook home page, then click “Ads and Pages” in the left sidebar, and then click “Pages” in the left sidebar. Click on the page that you want to configure and you will be back to the page setup page.

Now if you click on the “Apps” icon next to the tabs row you should see the “Services – FBML” available in the menu, click on it to add it to your row of tabs (Wall, Info, Photos, Videos, etc). Now all that’s left is to add the HTML to that page.

To add your HTML code, click on the “Wall” tab, then click the “Edit Page” link under the main page Picture in the left sidebar. Then click “Apps” on left navigation pane. Scroll down to the “Services – FBML” section and click “Go to App”.

This is the page where you will name your tab (ex: “Services”) and also add the HTML for your custom “Tab”/”Page”.

You can use my code as a guide on how to structure your page but you are completely free to design it however you want. Above is the screen shot of what our Facebook business page looks like. You can also see it live by clicking over to our Facebook business fan page.

As you may have noticed you can also send traffic directly to these pages instead of your “Wall” page. This is done in the “Manage Permission” link within the “Edit Page” section. You would go to the section called “Default Landing Tab” and enable the tab of your choosing in the drop down menu. Ours defaults to “Services”.

I hope you find this tutorial useful. Please leave a comment below or remember to share if you like this article.