Facebook Fan Page

My current assignment is to create a Fan Page on Facebook for our Founder, in order to handle all of the media requests and popularity she has received with her recent award. Its actually pretty interesting too. I go on facebook fairly often and update my profile when anything major happens in my life. But I've never used facebook to achieve business goals.

I read a post a while back from a fellow intern about the limitations to facebook and I certainly agree. Although it can certainly boost visibility to a degree, and also contribute to general interest, its rare that facebook will actually promote profit or generate business. We previously used a "cause" page on facebook, where we could even receive donations. But this was hardly successful. Facebook users rarely login to spend money, and are more interested in hearing recent news and enjoy wasting time in between projects.

The fan pages are unique however. They have the capability to expand marketing techniques to change format, layout, request donations, provide links, have an online store etc. all through the use of FBML. It is similar to HTML, but is a specific language used and developed by Facebook. This is in the process of being removed in exchange for another language which is more intuitive and a little bt more versatile called iframes. This is certainly a side of facebook I had not encountered before, but found fascinating. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and im certainly no pro, but I was able to adjust the settings of the fan page by inserting and writing some of my own code. In order to make the site really user friendly and appealing however we will need to use a professional writer or a generator of some kind. It sounds like we should maybe invest in Dreamweaver, although I don't think we have the money for it.