I’ve been busy lately learning the ins and outs of Facebook’s Fan Page program. The more I learn about it, the more I’ve come to realize that it’s a goldmine sitting there under the noses of small business owners.

Here’s why:

With Facebook Fan Pages, you can send out updates by email to your fans. It’s not spam since they requested to hear from you. It’s through Facebook’s email system so unlike autoresponders, you don’t have to worry about getting blocked. You can also interact with your fans through the discussion board. Your fans become your evangelists. It’s the very powerful Law of Permission in full effect! The best part is, it’s inexpensive and fairly easy to build a huge fanbase on Facebook.

Here’s how to build a huge Facebook Fan network:

The first thing you will want to do is to get a blog and post to it at least once a week. Next, grab the RSS feed from your blog and link that into your Fan Page through a Facebook App. I like the RSS Graffiti Facebook Application, but there are other ways to do this. This will update your fan page regularly with your blog’s content.

Now that you have a fan page, promote it to your friends and link to it from your print ads and websites. If you have a physical store, you can also put out flyers to invite people to check out your Fan Page.

Now, it gets really fun! It’s time to get a Facebook Ad.

Take some of your marketing budget and log into Facebook’s pay per click ad center. Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook uses demographic targeting. You can target by location. You can target by interests. You can target friends of friends. You can target all of the above at the same time! Once you learn the system, you will find out that overall it’s pretty darn slick.

Say you are a restaurant and want to just target a local zip radius. That’s possible. You want to just target Corvette owners who live in or near Dayton, Ohio? That’s possible too.

You can even target by age, which really makes it a goldmine for Medicare sales reps and reverse mortgage people.

But, get this. The longer you run the ad, the less you will spend to acquire new fans. This is because your fans will tell their friends. And they will tell their friends and so on. Facebook will also ad your Fan Page to recommended lists if you have a large enough fanbase.

Pretty soon, you will have a self growing fanbase and you won’t have to run ads at all if you don’t want to. It will just grow and grow on it’s own exponentially. To me, that’s way more powerful than any other form of advertising where if you don’t spend money, you don’t make money.

But, good content is essential to making this all work. If your page sucks and your fans don’t tell anyone or worse yet unsubscribe from the Fan Page, you are wasting your time. Take your time to do it right.

Are you seeing why I’m so excited about this opportunity here? It really is so, so powerful.

I hope you learned something with this little article about Facebook Fan Pages. Go get your page today! As always, if you need help in this area, do not hesitate to contact us.