CoPress

I used to be skeptical of using Facebook as a means of marketing and branding. The problem was that I never had enough fans to really make my Facebook page functional.

A Fan Box widget fixed that problem. And it can do the same for you.

What is a Fan Box?

I first saw a Fan Box in use with the launch of StudLife.com and immediately knew I had to use it too. It’s a minimally customizable widget that you can throw into the sidebar or footer of your website.

The upper portion of the box lists the name of your page, shows thumbnails of current fans, a stream of your updates and gives visitors the option of becoming a fan straight from your Web site. Of course, all these options are customizable. If you don’t want to show your fans, for example, you don’t have to.

I love this tool because it makes it so much easier for your fans to engage with you on Facebook. Let’s face it: people are generally lazy. They won’t take the extra effort to hunt you down on Facebook and become a fan. But if you put it in their faces, there’s no reason for them not to.

Since installing one of these handy boxes on the sidebar of mustangdaily.net on July 14, we’ve gotten 60 more fans. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but to put it in perspective, that’s a 71% increase that happened in six weeks. It took 7 months for us to get the first 85 fans.

People are finally starting to interact with our content, suggest story ideas, ask questions about articles that prompt further reporting and even just say, “Good job, thanks for interacting with us!”

The point: people will engage if you make it easy.

Before you install it

To put a Fan Box on your page, you of course need to first have a Facebook Fan page — not a group. A fan page can be better utilized than a group because it functions just like any other profile.

The best part is that any status updates you make on the fan page will be sent out to all your fans’ newsfeeds, just like any other status update. This gives users the ability to respond to links and updates you post. A group is static and incapable of this. And groups don’t come with a cool fan box.

A few tips for your Fan Page:

• Update it often. Although this can mean linking it with an RSS feed or with your Twitter updates, the best Facebook pages have custom updates.
• Interact with your readers. If people have questions or respond to your links, write back to them or tweet their comments to encourage others to add their own. I’ve found that just getting one person to comment will be a catalyst for at least a few others to chime in.
• Don’t overwhelm your fans. Facebook isn’t Twitter; update often, but not too often. Posting 10 updates a day might annoy your fans and cause them to block your updates from appearing on their newsfeed.
• Make it personal. You’re representing your organization’s brand, but that doesn’t mean have you have to sound like a PR machine. Things like “Hey, Happy Monday! Anyone have ideas for our story meeting today?” make your page feel approachable. One thing I do is make it clear that our page is not the Mustang Daily page, but the page for editors of the Mustang Daily to interact with readers, so it’s clear that it’s OK if we have some personality in our updates.

Installing the Fan Box

If you’ve made it this far, then you’re probably ready to get that handy tool on your site.

Facebook makes the installation really easy — it’s basically a matter of checking a few boxes and copying the code.

Step 1: Go to your Facebook fan page. Beneath your profile image, click “Add Fan Box to your site.”

Step 2: Customize your options. You can show your stream, show fan thumbnails, or simply embed “become a fan” without any of the other bells and whistles.

Step 3: Paste the code where you want it to appear. If you’re using WordPress, you can paste that code as a text widget.

Facebook’s developer wiki explains a few advanced options for manipulating the code to change height, width, number of fans that appear, etc.

You’ll also notice that there’s an option to use a “live stream” box which is similar to what CNN used during the presidential inauguration and Michael Jackson’s funeral. (I have yet to use this tool, so perhaps that will be another blog post.)

If you’ve used a Facebook Fan Box or if you have any other advice for maintaining a fan page, let us know in the comments!