Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Fan Page Basics-101!

by Mike Vallez on December 2, 2009

Facebook is the largest social media community in the world! In fact, I am sure most of you have heard that Facebook would be the third most populated country, if it were a country. So if you are a business, law enforcement agency, or anyone selling anything you should have a Faceboo Fan Page. Just to give you one more statistic if you’re not yet buying in. Facebook had just under 130,000,000 million unique visits for October 2009 and 2.5 billion visits overall. That last stat was “billions.” One last reason to set up your Facebook Fan Page is it is FREE, yep other than the time it takes to set it up initially and provide status updates, there is no cost.

First thing you will need to do is set up a Facebook personal profile account. Unfortunately Facebook at this time requires all Fan Pages to be attached to a personal profile. I suggest if you set up an empty or fake profile to attach your Fan Page to. A fake or empty profile is not one anyone will be using other than for your Fan Page. Remember to make the name for the personal account real enough and you will need a valid email address.

Now that you have your Facebook personal profile set up you click on help and search “how to create a Fan Page.”
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You will have to go through and make some choices that best fit your company, business, brand, cause, etc. Setting up your Fan Page as a website is one of the easiest ways to create a Fan Page especially if you have a website (guessing most do). But there are plenty of other choices to choose to craft your Fan Page. Be sure to put in as much relevant information in all the areas you can to adequately explain “what” your page is about “what” you offer for services and or “what” your product is about. If you are promoting a cause then be clear with purpose, how people can get involved, and contact information. Be sure to add your website address, pictures of your business, events, activities (off line), and what ever else you want to jazz up your Fan Page. If you want to take your Fan Page to the next level you can also have a customized side bar made by twitterimage.com.

Spread the word! If you have or know anyone with a large Facebook following I suggest you as them to join your Fan Page and have them use their account to send messages to their followers to join your Fan Page. You may also want to consider advertising on Facebook. The advertising on Facebook is very targeted, I mean very targeted. You can target age, male/female, occupation, location, and more. A little inspiration. I have about 2400 friends on my Facebook profile and I have used this following to jump start a Fan Page I manage (Tampa Bay Crusader). By me suggesting followers from my personal account I have grown the Tampa Bay Crusader Facebook Fan Page to 389 followers in just 4 weeks. Not bad and results may vary, but with the information in this article you should be able to get your Facebook Fan Page up and running.

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Facebook | How Police Can Use As A Social Media Tool

by Mike Vallez on November 19, 2009

Facebook is an extremely powerful social media community that has become larger than I am sure many Facebook executives would admit they thought was possible. Facebook had over 2.5 billion visits last month (10/2009), which is quite stunning. There are millions of people visiting Facebook billions of times a month to communicate with each other, but what is mostly missing from Facebook? A strong law enforcement presence.

A Facebook Fan Page is extremely easy to set up and run on a daily basis. A key point to remember is you should never set up your business (law enforcement agency) as a personal account or group. Both are tied to a person and both are in violation of Facebook rules, which could cause the accounts to be disabled. Here is the 411 on how to set up a Facebook Fan Page the right way:

1) Establish a personal account- right now this is the only way to create a Fan Page, I suggest you make this a new account not belonging to anyone in particular with the sole purpose of being the placeholder for the Fan Page.

2) Choose type of Fan Page-Website choice will allow you to put in the basic information about your Police Department which is a good choice since you are communicating on the web and you should have a website to promote.

3) Add Your Image- You will need a graphic to represent your brand or department, which most times you will already have again if you already have a web presence.

4) Publish-Once have your image uploaded, your content in place (website url, description of department, mission statement, etc) then you will publish your page. Once published you can begin to publish information on your wall (status box).

But, what do I want to publish to my Facebook Fan Page? Again, go back to the stunning statistic above, 2.5 billion visits in October 2009. You can communicate through posts to your wall a variety of important police information:

1) Crime prevention tips
2) Wanted person pictures
3) Videos from robberies or other crimes
4) Information about department/city activities
5) Community news relevant to the police departments mission
6) Missing persons
7) Blog posts if you have a blog, if you don’t start one

Another tip I suggest is to target followers geographically through the search function on Facebook to try to obtain followers (friends) in your community. Then once you have a decent following of local followers for your community follow their followers. This can be done very easy and the end game is to obtain as many local followers as you can to get your message out. With the large amount of people using Facebook I will almost guarantee that every law enforcement jurisdiction has plenty of Facebook users. I will say it again, police have an opportunity to communicate in “real time” with their citizens, which is a huge communication shift. If you have any questions on how to set up a Facebook Fan Page, contact me at mike@michaelvallez.com .

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