Facebook business page design

The team at 16 Interactive have been busy designing and building a few custom Facebook business pages for our clients and agency partners recently. This post aims to provide some more information on how they work, and what the benefits are.

Essentially there are two scenarios here:

If you already have a Facebook business profile set up, we can really boost its effectiveness and engagement by adding customised additional pages, and landing pages to your profile.
If you don’t already have a Facebook presence, we can help you set this up, integrate your site with Facebook, and create the customised elements that we’re going to discuss in this article.

A couple of recent examples (other than our own Facebook business page) include an events and ticket purchasing page for Jockey Club Racecourses (the largest commercial group in British horseracing), where you can buy tickets for any of their upcoming race events.

We’ve also been doing a lot more work under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for other equine-related businesses, a leading luxury bathroom and sanitary ware brand, and national automotive company.

These pages are either standalone sites, or a sub-section of a larger content managed website using a specific template.

What is a Facebook business page and what are the benefits?

Essentially a Facebook business page (or Facebook welcome page) is a standard website page, made to fit within a specially constructed website template, which is then pulled-in to Facebook via an iFrame.

Here is what a standard page looks like. Here is what the same page looks like when pulled-in to Facebook via the iFrame.

This kind of Facebook page can do almost anything a normal website can do, such as:

Sell products
Book tickets
Collect data
Play videos
Play games
Integrate with other systems
Track visitors using Google Analytics
Contain sub-pages (even a whole micro-site)
Encourage other social activity
Work alongside other social widgets within Facebook

This allows you to integrate your social campaigns more directly with your core business, track the success, and see how your social visitor behaviour differs to that of your main websites.

Big-brand Facebook welcome pages

An effective way to increase brand awareness is to create a default page which your visitors see, that encourages them to “Like” your page, and can even reward them for doing so.

The well documented Red Bull Facebook business page is a great example of this, where it shows lots of cool extreme sports videos, but you have to “Like” the page first in order to see them. This then encourages the friends of the person who “liked” the page to go check it out too (then they “Like” it too), and with enough momentum, it encourages the page to go viral.

Personally (as an extreme sports person myself) I’d not have a problem with my friends seeing that I “Like” Red Bull. However it’s also worth considering that this could also become a barrier to your content being viewed (and then shared), for example if a not-so-cool brand required people to publicly “Like” their page before displaying engaging content to them, they are more likely to alienate people than engage with them.

Similar strategies include iTunes’ 20 free songs for people who become fans. Having an engaging video that auto-plays with an easy-to-use library of other videos below is an effective way to encourage sharing of engaging content.

Finally, there is a lot more that can be done. Pizza Hut show you who out of your friends have been tagged in their restaurants, Starbucks encourage you to play a game that shares your scores with friends, and Ben & Jerry’s use a flash-based game that uses your microphone to detect when you clap your hands – clapping makes their animated cow jump over obstacles in the game. On one hand this is a clever way of bringing Wii-style interaction with a Facebook page, yet on the other it could alienate people who don’t have a microphone on their computer.

The only limit to what can be done is your imagination! If you have some ideas that you’d like to discuss, we can get our best creative people around the table with you and come up with something truly spectacular.

How to design a Facebook business page

Essentially a Facebook business page can be treated as a normal website page, with standard HTML and CSS. Flash, JavaScript and jQuery can all be used within your iFrame. The optimal page width is 505px wide.

An SSL certificate is advised for all Facebook pages which will be shown within your businesses’ profile so that even users with the tightest security and privacy settings get an unobstructed view of your page.

As with most web pages, but especially on social sites, fresh engaging content is crucial, so you’ll need to be able to quickly and easily add new content to the page via a CMS (content management system), product feed, or other data feed that keeps everything bang up-to-date.

You’ll also want to ensure that you have Google Analytics installed. Depending on your page structure, this can become a bit more tricky, but with some configuration of the standard GA code and some minor tweaks, it’s quite easy to add a deep level of Google Analytics tracking – all crucial stuff when it comes to measuring the success of your social campaigns.

How to add a Facebook business page to your existing website

If your site is already with us, it’s a very quick and easy thing for us to do (and therefore very cost effective). It also means you can manage the content really easily, as the Facebook page will just show-up as another page within your CMS.

The other advantage is that we can also integrate your Twitter feed and blog feed so that your tweets and blog posts are delivered straight to your Facebook page automatically. In fact everything you see from on the 16 Interactive Facebook business page can be added as part of the process.