With all the hullaballoo about Facebook Pages, I thought it was time I experimented with one for myself. As I wrote in yesterday’s post, there are a few instances where it may make sense for a blogger to have a Facebook Page. One is for a multi-author blog such as Snapshot Chronicles Roadtrip, the family travel blog I launched about eight weeks ago. Each author can be an admin, use his/her own Facebook following to help build the brand and share the load of adding unique content — beyond just the blog posts that get fed automatically.
I’m still experimenting but I want to warn readers to be very very careful when selecting the initial category for their page. There are three basic categories, each with sub options, and once you’ve selected your choice, there is no going back. The only way to change once you’ve created a page is to START OVER. If you’ve actually published the page and started publicizing it, this means losing those fans, and hoping they follow you.
Why is this so important?
Two reasons. First, discoverability. Facebook uses the categories in search, and if you are in the wrong one, fewer people will find you in general searches, versus specific ones based on your blog or brand name.
Second is that the options under the Info tab are different for each basic category. Local Business allows you to list your physical address, hours of operation, website address and information about parking and public transit. No free-form fields. For a Brand Product or Organization, you can list typical business information, including company overview and products in free-form fields. Artists, Bands & Public Figures are presented with options very similar to the ones in the personal profile. These cannot be changed or added to.
The Facebook Page for Snapshot Chronicles Roadtrip ended up in the wrong category – Local Other Business. Not because I didn’t pick the one I wanted (Brand, Travel). I did. However, I initially typed my electronic signature with my middle initial; Facebook wanted my Facebook name exactly, without the initial, so it posted an error message. I realized the error, fixed it, and saved.
What I didn’t realize was that in the refresh Facebook had also reset the category to Local Other Business. I pulled a similar sequence of screens to illustrate this for you.
Initial Screen:
Signature Error:
Refresh:
The good news? I mostly did the fan page to find out what might go wrong when creating one, and lo and behold I was not disappointed. Not having the right options on the Info tab is not a big deal for my family travel blog, but it might be for your company or brand.
What should you do?
- Take a look at the three types of pages and pick the right one for your brand, blog or business.
- When you are filling out the initial creation screen, check the box, type in your profile name correctly and carefully review the selection of category before you hit Create Page.
- If you get the error message, check twice.
You can start over at any time until you actually publish your page, but in my case, I just didn’t notice that the category had defaulted to something else until I started trying to customize the info page much, much later in my process.
I’ll just chalk it up to one of those things I do, so you don’t have to, and hope that my experience helps at least one other person avoid the same mistake. I do know I am not the only one who has run into the problem, as there is a support topic in the Facebook FAQs.
So pick carefully!
Some additional nits:
I wish you could have a different image for the thumbnail and the main graphic. Unlike headshots, which most people use on their personal Facebook profiles, logos don’t always size down to something acceptable in a teeny thumbnail square, and certainly not when the same image is used for both with no resizing possible.
I have a devil of a time getting back to my page to edit it. I hope I am just missing something obvious, but the only way I’ve found so far is to navigate to all the pages I follow and then pick mine. There has to be an easier way….
I just created a page for my blog last week but haven’t promoted it yet… It irks me to no end that you can’t add a feed to the wall, where you can on your regular page. But some older pages seem to have that capability.. Anyway, good luck with it! Here’s mine:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/mommy-bytes/83243327809
I think there is an easier way to get to your pages. Along the bottom of my FB screen is a toolbar, and in the lower left there’s a button that says “Applications” and then there are several icons to the right of that – phots, groups, events, etc. The very first button listed is the FB icon with a little green blurb box behind it and if you mouse over, it says “Ads and Pages”. Click on that and it brings up a screen with a box where you can create a page or an ad. In the top of the box are three menu options: Ads Manager, Pages, and Help. If I click Pages, it brings up the admin screen for the fan page I manage.
Hope this works for you!
@amymengel
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Thanks Amy. I’ll try that.
Angela, you’d probably call this a Facebook hack, as it isn’t, you know, intuitive or anything 🙂 The following should work. That means I’m pretty sure this is how I got the blog feed on the wall 🙂
1. In Edit Notes functionality, choose Edit & import the RSS feed you want to show to the Notes. You can only import one.
2. In Edit Page, select Note, Application Settings.
3. Choose the Additional Permissions tab and tick the box to give Notes permission to publish to streams (ie your Wall). Anything you put on the Notes page, including your RSS feed will now publish to your streams.
There’s an app called Social RSS that also does this, and I am going to test it on my personal page. I would like to publish all three of my blog streams to my profile. Facebook limits you to one. Right now I do it through FriendFeed but I’d like to see the posts not just a link.
Thanks Susan, that worked great. Doesn’t actually link to the blog, but the content is there.
You can use Google Reader to and Facebook’s RSS feed to post multiple feeds to your notes.
Set up Google Reader and your RSS feeds. Go to Manage Subscriptions / Folders and Tags…create a folder and mark it as a “Public”. Then click “View Public Page” and copy the URL. That should work…if not, click “Atom Feed” on the right and then copy that URL.
Social RSS is nice in that it links directly to the blog, but it limits 10 posts per 48 hours.
A few ideas for navigating to your Page:
To get to your Page’s Edit page quickly, bookmark https://www.facebook.com/pages/manage. If you have multiple Pages, it will take you to a Page that lists all the ones you administer. If you only administer one, it will take you directly to that Page’s Edit page.
To get to your Page’s Wall quickly to post something, you can also bookmark that URL. Or create a Friend List that only has your Page as a member (it’s relatively new that you can add Pages to lists). Then click on the filter for it on your home page and click on the link to your Page from one of your posts. Another alternative is to create a username for the Page, which makes it easy to type in. If you don’t have enough fans for that (you need 100), create a URL from your website, e.g. https://www.snapshotchronicles.com/facebook, and have it redirect to your Page’s URL. Finally, you could add a link to your Page in the Information box on your Profile page and click-through from there.
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