Four Things You Must Know To Build A Facebook Page For Your Business

While Facebook can be very simple to use it's not always obvious how to set things up especially when it comes to your Facebook business page. A lot of the steps you need to build your business Facebook page are buried and hard to find.

Here are the four tips and shortcuts you need to know to help you more easily set up your Facebook business page and make it more effective:

1. Start with a personal page first. That's right! You must have a personal Facebook page in order to build a Facebook page for your business. That stymies a lot of people right there, who begin their Facebook journey by trying to build a Facebook business page without first having a personal page. This is actually a violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and is a key part of their mission to minimize SPAM. This is all part of the "social" fabric of Facebook, knowing that beneath every business page is an actual person. Yes, even Facebook pages by Hershey and Marriott have a personal Facebook account behind them.

2. You need a minimum of 25 "likes" or followers to claim your shortened domain name. For instance, before our Facebook address became the very elegant and streamlined "facebook.com/samsonmedia," it was something more like "facebook.com/pages/samsonmedia/173510616007502". Try finding this in any kind of proactive way on Facebook. This information is buried so deep that the only way I found it was when someone told me, finally putting me out of my misery. So to help you avoid the same fate, once you get 25 likes, just go to the following URL and apply for your friendly URL: facebook.com/username

3. Use plugins to bring your Facebook content to your other non-Facebook Internet properties such as your website or blog. Again, the tools that Facebook provides to create these external widgets and badges are easy to use --- once you find them. Plugins are great for letting people know about your Facebook page, guiding them there by often showing the faces of other members and snippets of your content.

4. Create a custom tab and a custom landing page with a specific call to action. To take your Facebook page to the next level and really separate it out from personal pages, we highly recommend creating a custom landing page that has a focused call to action that specifically prompts new visitors to like and join your page. Once they click the like button at the prompting of this custom landing page they will no longer see this tab and will default, upon their next visit, to your regular wall content. Our custom Facebook page not only asks new visitors to like us, but includes an email sign-up box, embedded YouTube video and social media buttons that link to our other social media properties on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Starting out with a concise call to action on your custom Facebook business page will effectively encourage people to "opt in" to your marketing messages and give your Facebook page a clear purpose in your overall marketing mix.

Gene Sower is the president of SamsonMedia.net, a New Jersey-based Internet marketing company that specializes in creating customized Facebook pages for business.