Add a Shop Tab
I have been doing a bit of maintenance on my Facebook Fan Page and came across this excellent add-on, Shoptab. It’s only useful if you have products to sell but it is fantastically convenient and simple to set up if you do. I have a self-hosted ecommerce website but having a shop on Facebook too is great in terms of visibility and I think fans are bound to be more engaged if they can shop and view products directly from Facebook rather than having to go to a different site. It costs $10 a month at the moment, which I think you’ll agree is a bargain! I had to hack around with my Google Merchant product feed in order to upload it to Shoptab, but the results are worth it and meant 200+ products were uploaded in an hour or two. If you don’t have the ability to export a Google product feed from your own ecommerce site, you can create one manually using a spreadsheet or just type the products into Shoptab, one by one.
Build a Custom Landing Page
Another useful tip from Mashable is to build a custom landing page which will be my next project on my own site.
Customise your Profile Page Image
You can also hack the profile page image on your Facebook Fan Page which I’ve done on another Page I admin, the Dappers Fan Page. It’s a bit fiddly and only recommended if you are familiar with image editing techniques.
Creating Custom Tabs on your Facebook Page (including Newsletter and Youtube tabs)
I’ve used Static FBML (which is essentially simplified HTML) to create custom tabs on my own Mimimyne Facebook Page, including a newsletter sign up tab with code from Mailchimp which will provide you with ready made code, and a customised Youtube Tab with embedded Youtube Videos (I learned how to do this from this blog).
Apps are constantly being created to do jobs like these but it really is worth investigating Static FBML if you want to have control over your Page and how it looks.
There is a great round up on customising Facebook Pages on Techcrunch which links to Static FBML as well as some of the apps that can help you do this if you don’t want to mess around with code.
Tips on essential apps for your Facebook Business Page
Finally, here are some great tips from Matt Silverman on apps that can improve your Business Facebook Fan Page! It’s amazing what we can do with these pages nowadays, even if you are irritated by certain tricks Facebook pulls on Page Admins such as suddenly changing the size of images allowed in Pages, they have given us the opportunity to make Business Pages very engaging and entertaining.