Becky from Glue and Glitter recently wrote a great post on How to Create a Facebook Fan Page for Your Crafty Business. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of questions pop up about this very topic, particularly in the forums on Etsy, so I thought I’d ask Becky to let me share her tips on how to do this with all of you. These tips work for any business that hasn’t yet set up a Facebook fan page. (And you should if you haven’t!)
Become a fan of Glue and Glitter on Facebook or join the Miss Malaprop fan page!
The post last week on approaching stores about selling your wares got a lot of love, so I thought I’d do a few more of these posts about crafty biz life.
Someone emailed over the weekend with a few questions about setting up her Facebook fan page, and it reminded me of what I went through setting up mine. No one should have to go through that! Here are a few helpful hints to save you some heartache:
Setup
The first thing I had trouble with was actually creating the page. There doesn’t seem to be a handy link anywhere to the fanpage creation area. To set up a fan page go here.
For the category, “Brand, Product, or Organization” is a good one. It keeps things nice and broad. You might want to check the box to keep the page private until you’re ready to publish. That way, you can add photos and customize things, and folks won’t stumble onto your work in progress. Once you’ve done that, you just name your page and you’re ready to roll!
(Note from Miss Malaprop: to set a custom URL for your fan page, so you don’t have all of those numbers at the end – my fan page url is http://www.facebook.com/shopMissMalaprop for example – go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ to set a shorter, custom link for your page. You can change this once you have at least 25 fans.)
Customizing and Maintaining
You’ll want to upload at least one profile picture – maybe a picture of your products or a logo – so folk can quickly see what the page is about. A description box really helps with this, too. Clicking over to the Info tab and adding a blurb about your business helps, too! That blurb should also show up in a box on your page’s sidebar.
If you have an Etsy shop, there are a couple of cool ways that you can integrate that into your fan page! My favorite app for this is called RSS Graffiti. Once you install that app, you can set up any RSS feed to go to either your personal Facebook account or any fan page you’ve got set up! To get the RSS feed for your Etsy shop, head over to your shop’s main page. On the bottom of the right sidebar, there should be a link that reads “Subscribe to Shop’s Feed:”
Just copy that url, paste it into RSS Graffiti, and every time you list something in your shop it will show up on your fan page, too! This is also a handy way to feed your blog updates onto your fan page.
There’s also a super-handy My Etsy app that you might want to add. It adds a tab to your fanpage that’s basically a snapshot of your shop. You can also use the My Etsy page to feed your listings onto your fan page. If you decide to do this, learn from my mistake! Remove the rss feed of your shop from the RSS Graffiti app. Otherwise, every shop update will show up twice on your page.
While we’re on the topic of learn from my mistake, keep your fan page in mind if you’re doing a large shop update. Do folks want to see ten or 15 new items clogging up their Facebook feed? Probably not. If you’re doing a big shop update, I’d recommend removing your shop’s rss feed from RSS Graffiti, then adding it back when you have just one or two items left to add. That way, your fans can see that you’ve updated your shop, but they don’t get bombarded. You could also add it back after you’re all done, then post a status message on your page saying that you just did a big shop update.
A frustration that my friend had, which I share, is that Facebook doesn’t send fan page admins any notifications about the page’s activity. That means you have to monitor the page to see if anyone’s liked or commented on your updates there. This is a little cumbersome! What I’ve seen some folks do is “like” all of the updates on their fan page, because Facebook will send updates to users about things they “like.” Sort of a weird workaround, but at least it’s something?
Promotion
There are a few different tools that I’ve used to promote my fan page, and I’m sure there are hundreds more that I haven’t used yet.
The easiest is that handy “Suggest to Friends” that’s right underneath your profile photo:
Just pick the friends who you think would be into adding you as a fan, click send, and wait!
You can also add a link to your facebook fanpage on your website, maybe as a widget in your sidebar? Facebook makes it really easy to add a fan page badge to your sidebar.
If you use any other social media, like Twitter or Stumble Upon, you can share your facebook fan page there, too! You might also want to update your blog with a post about your new fan page.
Above that handy “Send to Friends” button is a “Promote with an Ad” link, that I have to confess I’d never clicked before. I played around with it some. Basically, it lets you set up a sidebar ad on Facebook that targets a specific audience. It gets pretty detailed, so if you’re interested I recommend playing around. It also lets you choose your rate and if you’re paying per click or CPM. If paying for ads isn’t something you have in your budget right now, this probably isn’t for you. It seemed like it bore mentioning, though!
(Update from Miss Malaprop: There’s a great thread on Etsy with tips for buying Facebook ads right now. Check it out for more info!)
So here’s where I turn to you guys, since I bet a lot of you have fan pages already. Do you have any apps you’re using, setup tips, or promotional advice to share that I missed here?
Becky Striepe is an independent crafter and freelance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia with her husband and two cats. She loves working with vintage fabric and salvaged materials. There’s just something about giving found objects a brand new life that really appeals to her. They lend their own stories to everything she makes. Check out her eco-friendly crafts in the Glue and Glitter Etsy shop!
You can find her writing on Glueandglitter.com, at Green Options, and at greenUPGRADER. She writes about eco-friendly crafts and sustainable living.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Great tip on the custom username. I’m going to set one right now!
Great tips! I have a fan page for my blog but it doesn’t get much action. I’m going to use the “suggest to friends” function asap.
I had no idea I could add my Etsy shop to my fanpage, thanks for the info! I promote my fanpage on my blog & run special sales where you have to become a fan to get the discount. My fanpage is steadily growing.
Thanks so much for the overview and especially the rssfeed tip which solves part some of my frustration with the default pathway linking to our personal facebook profiles. The provided facebook shop link from etsy or any comment I make on another person’s fan page links back to my personal profile not my business page…thus no new fans! I have looked and looked for a way to change my settings and have messages relay back to my business fan page.Is there a way to do this? Recently I have also run a free downloadable (drop.io) Valentine pdf link from my fan page to thank my little group and broadcast it on twitter to reward new fans. So far it has not yield results. (Several people thanked me on the site wall and sent it on to their though.) Hard to grow fans I fear without spammy begging. Any thoughts?
Joanne, I don’t know if there’s a way to comment on other people’s fan pages and have it directly link back to your fan page and not your personal account. I think it’s just the way FB is set up. I’ve seen some people create sort of a “personal” account that is for their business (which I think FB frowns upon and will often delete if they discover you doing this) and then they have a fan page too. That all seems like a lot of work to me, especially if FB could potentially delete it, since they like having a “real person” associated with the accounts.
It does seem like they could make some changes to better accommodate the fan pages though and let people use them in a more logical way.