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You may have read my last post on Using Facebook to promote your website; this is basically a follow up on that, only using Facebook in a different way for website promotion!

In the last post I was explaining how to use Facebook Groups to promote your website, whereas this article is for promoting your website using Facebook Fan Pages.

What are the advantages of using Facebook “Fan Pages” over “Groups”?

The main advantage is, when you make a wall post to your own wall (also known as a status update), the post is submitted to every fan’s Homepage Feed.  This means every “fan” of your page will see all posts you make on your Fan Page.  This can generate a lot of interest towards your group – but remember, do not spam your fans with status updates because it will cause people to become very agrivated and they may stop being a fan! (NOT GOOD!)

The other great think about Fan Pages is the Discussion boards.  Every time anyone talks on a discussion topic on your Facebook Fan Page, it will send a notice to their profile “wall” saying they have participated in a discussion on *topic title* at *Fan Page name*.. This also attracts people to your page!

Get on with it!  Tell me how to promote my site using Facebook Fan Pages!

Okay… To begin; Click here to make your Facebook Fan Page.

Now, you need to follow the steps it gives you to build your Fan Page.  Upload a decent, meaningful page display picture, fill in ALL the information secions that you can, and update your Page’s info box because this is displayed on every section of your Fan Page making it extra important!

Now go to the Invite Friends link.  Here you will be able to select friends from your friends list to invite to the group – and you will run into TWO MASSIVE annoyances – It limits you to inviting a maximum of 20 people, AND you have to select them all manually! Ugh!

However; I do have a tip to avoid this limitation!  Simply add all your friends to a custom contact list.. Then, when inviting friends, choose that friend list in the “Filter” of who you want to add – then it will let you simply click “Select All” – And with that, the limit also disappears! Genius!

Then wait for people to join!   It helps if your “Friends” are genuine friends because they will be more likely to join if a real friend has invited them!

Now, once a few people have joined (whether it be ten or one hundred), create a discussion topic, and give people inscentive to discuss the topic, even if it doesn’t match your page’s content, just make a discussion topic people will like to respond to, because at this point, what you want is interest!  The benefits of being able to get people to your site only appear once you have those valuable fans!

There you have it, the basics of getting a Facebook Fan Page started and populated.  All questions are welcomed!

Thank you for reading!

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There are many ways of promoting your website using various social networking promotion techniques.  But today I’m going to focus on Facebook’s “Group” pages.

If helps if you already have a facebook account with lots of friends who are likely to join your group if they get a personalise invite from you (I will explain this later on in this post).  However, you don’t actually need ANY friends, because you can invite your entire email address book, or to selected email addresses.  I will explain all this within the post.

Firstly you need to create a facebook group.

+ Create a Facebook Group

Choose a relevant group title, and add a brief but detailed description of what your website is all about.

There is a “Recent News” box in the group setup.  You should use this wizely as people like to be kept up to date on important issues / news to do with a product, service, or website that interests them (presuming people who join do so because they are interested in the topic your website is based on).  Make sure you keep this updated with all events and news to do with your site.  Do not waste your time updating it with irrelevant information however; You are better off updating it less regularly than you should, whilst maintaining a quality news update which people will actually appreciate.

Upload a relevant image for your group.  This may be your logo or advertisment banner which hopefully you will already have at your fingertips.

Now, when it comes to inviting people you have two options (or you can do both, of course).

You can manually select all of your existing Facebook friends, which may take you up to 5 minutes depending on how many friends you have, but it is definitely worth it.  It is highly recommended that you choose to add a “Personal Message” to your invite… This ensures that your friends are invited properly, not just with a standard invite notice; it raises the chances of people accepting your invite.

Your second option is to invite via emal.  Here you have two separate choices.  You can either import your contacts and send the invite to everyone in your email address book, or you can manually add emails to a list.  This is up to you, but the manual method will take a lot longer and will be somewhat tedious.

You should now be ready to publish your group and post an automated update message to your profile (which will be seen by all of your friends too, which is handy if they don’t check their invites), so don’t skip this process!

Now, sit back and watch your member list grow!

Check back here for part two of the Facebook promotion guide, where I will explain how you can convert those group members into active members on your website!

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