Your site and Facebook

[Crazyfruitbat]

Seeing that we are have to be facebooking stuff these days and I have done the fan page website thingy and I have to admit, I have no idea what to put on it - ok, I have it set up to pull the data off my RSS feeds to auto post the data. I post the odd youtube vid but apart from that what the heck can you do with it? At the end of the day, the more time I spend on facebook faffing around with stuff, the less time I have to write anything for my own site, which is my priority (as we all know content is king).

Normally I have a bi-weekly poll on the forums voting on images, and we are going to test to see if we get more votes on facebook to see if we can get more attention to the site. I don't know if this little experiment will work but its worth a try.

What do you guys do on your facebook pages?

 

[Ray]

Nothing.

Just the basic info, url to our site and logo.

 

[Crazyfruitbat]

Nothing.

Just the basic info, url to our site and logo.

But I'm gathering you get very little back in the way of hits?

 

[Ray]

The facebook fan page itself will not bring you any traffic.

What brings you traffic is the "Like" button.

For instance, when a user becomes a fan, nothing happens(but it is somewhat useful, as the user has now subscribed for alerts, etc). Now, when a user "likes" a thread, post, etc. that gets posted on his profile and is visible to all his/her friends, and this DOES drive you traffic.

Also, a fan page is created for every thread liked, so if you have hundreds of liked threads, I doubt you'd want to edit/personalize them all.

 

[Ray]

Let's do a quick comparison here:

One of our sites has 35 fans.

But a thread within the same site has 42 likes.

That means that 42 people drove some traffic, while the other 35 became fans/subscribed.

So don't worry too much about the appearance/content of the fan page, just make sure there is a link to your site.

 

[boatswife]

Can anyone give me an example of a fan page, just to see what it is. I don't have FB and because of the nature of my forum (support), I can't use feeds and don't want people posting questions on FB........everything really needs to stay on the forum. Is a fan page pretty much like a blog, where I can showcase new things and that's it????

Sorry to be lame, but I never really got into FB.

 

[Jason]

Fan pages are not an instant traffic driver. The key thing to remember is that it's social media, where you create relationships and convert that into traffic. Duplicating content from your site (i.e., simply syndicating an RSS feed) is not going to do that.

Some tips that have helped us:

• Engage your fans. Reply to posts and comments, and thank people for liking the page.
• Get your fans to tag photos. If you host events, take plenty of pictures, load them to your page and encourage fans to tag themselves. Likewise, encourage fans to post their own.
• If you produce videos, load them to your page and embed it on your site.
• If you have a Twitter account, link it to your fan page.
• Post updates regularly. Stale pages will quickly be forgotten or unliked. This is where you have to get creative, and make things interesting so people return and perhaps get intrigued to visit your site.

 

[Paul B]

Can anyone give me an example of a fan page

http://www.facebook.com/XenForo

 

[boatswife]

Thanks Paul!

 

[kilcher]

Auto-posting is bad IMO. It spams people's walls. And if people really want to see all of that stuff they'll come to your site.

On my "big board" I just pick 2-3 threads per day that I find interesting and post links to them (with a little comment) encouraging people to discuss.

 

[Crazyfruitbat]

Thanks for the comments guys.

Auto-posting is bad IMO. It spams people's walls. And if people really want to see all of that stuff they'll come to your site.

On my "big board" I just pick 2-3 threads per day that I find interesting and post links to them (with a little comment) encouraging people to discuss.

Actually I don't RSS stuff that is from the forum, I do it from my front page which may only have a couple of posts a week and it is written content not just chat in a forum.

 

[tmb]

Just use it to post info or big threads going on. Very helpful during any downtime (planned or otherwise).