How Can I Use Facebook Pages for Personal Branding?

Facebook pages are extremely important when creating your personal brand and telling your story. Why? They can reach millions of people in the blink of an eye! The main purpose of using Facebook is to create a community element around your brand. When you have the ability to create the community element, you will experience the beauty of viral communication. There are four great reasons for using your Facebook page to promote and develop your brand:

Facebook reaches millions—With around 1 billion users on Facebook, some of them are bound to like your brand, and a professional page makes your brand accessible to them. Unlike your personal profile, your professional page has no limits to the number of Facebook supporters that can be associated with it. The users on Facebook can essentially join your brands page without limitation.

Facebook pages allow for community-based relationships to develop—Having your brand on a page is an outlet to post all things about you…but not all things deeply personal to you. A page separates the personal from the professional. It allows you to maintain your professional presence on Facebook. You can share business updates and post videos and pictures for the people who joined your page and want to know the latest news. A page allows professional relationships to develop because people are on the page for professional purposes. A page also lets you grow your professional community in step with your personal community. It gives your audience an outlet to reach you without cluttering up your Inbox.

Advertise through Facebook ads—A professional page gives you plenty of opportunities for paid advertising. You can create ads that appear on Facebook sidebars. You are in complete control of who you want your audience to be. (Target your desired product/service demographic, and verify results with your analytics.) When you set your desired demographics, Facebook tells you how many potential users are available to click on your ad. Let’s say you want to run an ad for the Humane Society and reach single females between the ages of 40 and 55 who live within a 10-mile radius of your zip code. Facebook can tell you that 5,403 women meet the criteria and use Facebook. You can test ads you create to see what works best. The ads can promote your page or your website. By using the Like button, you can see how influential your ad is to the Facebook demographic.

Facebook ads are based on a pay-per-click and pay-per-impression model of payment. For the pay-per-click model, when a Facebook user clicks your ad, you pay a price you determined when setting up the ad at the beginning of the process. We recommend that you not use the pay-per-impression model. Return will not be as high in terms of clicks when you pay per impression. Stick with pay-per-click.

What is the best price to pay-per-click? It’s really up in the air. Facebook fluctuates best cost based on the amount of use in a given 12-hour period. To stay relevant, always look at the cost Facebook is asking you to spend. You will find the number in your Settings page. You set the budget and can change it at any time.

Note that content has shown a greater click-thru rate than paid ads within Facebook. Although Facebook ads are amazing for driving users to your pages (fan or personal), do not lose sight of organic content. You need to measure the influence of both types.

Facebook Analytics provide insight—Only a professional page gives you the ability to use the Facebook Analytics (or Insights) application. With Facebook Insights, you can gather metrics about your readers, including which wall posts get the most reactions, when users visit your page most often, and what the demographics are for your page’s friends. This helps you understand and expand your supporter base. Without a tool like this, you would have to do extensive research for the same information

Learn more about personal branding and social development in Branding Yourself.