Hi, I'm starting a new development studio focusing on iOS and would like it to have a Facebook page from the start. Looking for some advices how to set it up properly, as I'm not familiar with Facebook before, haven't had an account there ever (yes, it is possible ). So my questions are: - Should I first have a personal account and only after that create a page for the company (which is linked to the personal account)? Why? or - Should I straight away use the link "create a page for a company" on the front page of facebook.com if yes: - Should I select "local company or place" , "company, organization, or institution", "brand or product" or "entertainment". What is the difference between all these options that are given to the user when he first clicks "create a page for celebrity, band or company" from the home page of facebook.com? Thanks a lot in advance for the help!
We just recently setup a Facebook page for our upcoming game, Ice Tales, so I can share a bit about how it went. What we did was create a specific email account in order to setup the fan page using the "Create a Page for Company". Facebook is setup under a one page/one email address system. I wouldn't suggest doing this under a personal account. We set it up as a product/brand. We also have a separate company page that we setup that is distinctly different than the game fan page. Its sort of a preference whether you want to do that or not, but I believe its probably a good thing to do. Once you have 25 fans, you can create a "username" for your fan page which means that instead of sending users to some funky link like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ice-Tales/218644094813959 you can instead send them to a clean SEO'd URL like this: http://www.facebook.com/icetales We're experimenting with having custom content that is available only to fans of the page. If you have some experience with web programming and are handy with the Google, you can do some pretty neat stuff with the Facebook IFRAME tabs. It should be a reasonably powerful marketing mechanism because your fans all have e-mail addresses so you can send them messages directly when you have a big announcement. I wish the iTunes store had a similar mechanism. If you have the time to setup an iframe tab, I would suggest creating a special tab that summarizes the app and the available content on the page and use that as the "unfriended" landing page, rather than the wall. At any rate - good luck - and hope you have a successful launch. ------------------------------------ Widget Revolt Twitter: http://twitter.com/WidgetRevolt Check out Ice Tales on the website or Facebook
Thanks for sharing your experiences, very useful. Just one question: so when you have created your company page and product page, have those been linked to a personal account at any stage or are they completely separate from your personal page?
As an independent developer, I would suggest it is to your benefit to have a "personal" page as well. Even if you are sketchy "ohhh ohhh I don't wanna get on Facebook for various reasons" (and it is hard to argue with those reasons, I will not deny) in the long term it will serve you well to have a contact/presence there. Facebook has sort of become "the new email" - not to mention countless other developers/media people are accessible on there as well, and if you plan on doing any kind of networking down the road, it will make things much easier. Just because you have a personal FB page with your name/photo on there, doesn't mean that you have to put "personal info" up there that you might be uncomfortable with sharing, as well.
Yes - we had to have a personal account somewhere in the system. As it so happens, the company page was registered using a personal account. However the personal account that was used was the "person" created with the custom facebook email address that I mentioned earlier. For instance, we setup a personal account using email address [email protected]. Then we created the company page and made the [email protected] the admin. Then we created the product fan page, and had to use a different email account for that as apparently you can only create one page per facebook account.
Ok, thanks. Does anyone know if it makes any actual difference (in terms of available features on FB) if you register the company page directly without a personal account being set up first - compared to a situation when you use your personal account to setup your company page? I.e. does this affect the nature of the company page somehow? I've been looking for this info from FB and Google'd it but haven't found out the answer yet... I know the usual benefits and drawbacks of using Facebook for personal stuff, and the fact that you don't need to share too much of your personal information there if you don't want to, so I'm aware of all of that. Still, I would prefer to register my company account without a personal account, and I'm wondering will I miss some important features on the company page if I do it that way.
