Back in January of 2009, Facebook’s 35-54 year old demographic grew 276% and the over 55 year old not far behind at 194%. If your market is younger adults don’t despair their stats were doubling every 6 months at that time. Here are some more staggering stats for you. Today Google has over 860,000,000 pages indexed and Yahoo shows over 54,000,000 back links from Facebook. Today (according to Facebook Statistics) Facebook has over 400 million active users and over half of those users log onto Facebook every day.

So what does this mean to brands, business owners, managers,and so forth? This means everyone has a free shot at tapping into this goldmineof opportunity; which is essentially boils down to the opportunity to establishinga social relationship with your audience. It is very important to mention that there is an underlying code (a whole new etiquette to abide) in which one should clearly understand before establishing a company or branded Facebook Fan page. Before the etiquette lesson comes design, so let’s explore some good design practices.

For starters, it is important to customize your company Facebook Fan page to match your own website for continuity and just a plain old good branding strategy. Some tabs on the fan page allow for a lot of customization as shown on this page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whitecap-Stand-Up-Paddleboarding/139837049542?v=app_4949752878 and also integration with other essential tools such as Constant Contact as shown in this example.

One word of advice is to not even consider launching a fan page until you have thoroughly investigated the necessary time it takes to devote to the page; the worst thing you can do is build a page and not monitor it. This is a quick turn off for your customers and once abandoned they are very reluctant to come back. Another consideration is whether to start a standalone company or brand page, or a Fan page attached to your personal profile page. My suggestion is to add your company fan page to your personal FB page to allow a direct connection with your fan base and makes the fan page itself more personable. Often Facebook fans enjoy peeking into the actual personalities behind the brand or company represented on the fan page.

After setting up your page be sure and complete the profile in its entirety including links back to your own hosted web site. Then upload your logo or brand image. This image will need to be 200 x 200 pixels wide total and remember that the thumbnail produced will be truncated so the actual inset of the image needs to be 176 by 176 pixels with a 24 pixel perimeter of whitespace. This image can only be a gif or jpeg and unfortunately png and swf’s are not supported.   Although later on in later my posts I will share with you how to embed a swf or flash video in your FB fan page. Tomorrow I will dive into some etiquette considerations since it makes sense to know what to share and what not to share before your content can be added.