This is the second in my series of posts describing the steps involved in adding a business to the Top 10 Free Places to List a Business. In this post, I will describe the process of adding a Facebook Fan Page for my friend Kelton’s business, QUICK-BEND design. Note that I say Fan Page, but Facebook mostly says “Page” without the “Fan” – they used to say “Fan Page”, but I guess they found it too limiting. There’s no difference between the two, but I find it confusing to just say Facebook Page, so stick with the old naming.

To add a page, you have to be logged in to a Facebook account to add a page. Then go to the Create a Page page. You can create a page from any account, and unlike the Google Local Business Center, more than one account can have administrative access to a Fan Page.

From the Create a Page page, I selected “Local” and the category “Other Business”. I also selected “Do not make Page publicly visible at this time.” – I figured I’d let Kelton decide when he wants to make it public.

Believe it or not, that’s it. I could have stopped there and make the page live, but of course it’s nice to put up something for people to look at if they visit, so I added photos from the QUICK-BEND design web site. To keep things simple, I created photo folders to match the categories on QUICK-BEND. It may seem unnecessary to duplicate all of the photos, but I don’t think so. People are very familiar with Facebook photo navigation, and frankly I find the WordPress navigation on the QUICK-BEND site a little tedious. Case in point: I’d been to the QUICK-BEND site a number of times, but had no idea how talented and prolific an artist Kelton is:

Tip: if you are uploading a bunch of photos at once, you can select the option “Edit Album” after the photos have been uploaded. This will allow you to add captions to all of the photos at once, which saves a lot of time.

The other important things to do are:

• Upload a profile photo – you can do this by clicking on the place where the profile photo goes.
• Add a web site URL and location information – you can do this by clicking on the “Info” tab, then “Edit”
• Add a description – this is just below the profile photo, click on the pencil icon

The whole process would have taken 15-20 minutes tops, save for the fact that I had to go to Kelton’s web site and save all of the photos to my computer before I could upload them. That and adding captions to the photos took a little longer. The thing I like most about Facebook Fan Pages for businesses is that they are a very unobtrusive way to let people know of recent news and upcoming events. Much better than email in my opinion. And the Facebook environment encourages users to share content and see what their friends are sharing.

Here is the finished page, if you’d like to check it out and become a fan.

And a couple of other posts highlighting cool things businesses are doing on their Fan Pages:
Einstein Bros + Facebook: Good Bagels Make Good Friends
Titus Cycles Tattoo Contest