Chancellor RAQ: Creating Facebook Pages

This is the start of a new occasional feature at SMUG, in which we’ll answer publicly some of the questions that are sent via e-mail. I thought about calling these FAQs, but a question doesn’t need to be asked frequently to be worth sharing the answer publicly. It could be that others just haven’t thought to inquire. So we’re creating a category for them called Recently Asked Questions (Chancellor RAQs).

This first question actually does fit the the frequency criterion, too, since I’ve had it a couple of times in the last week:

Q. How do I create a “fan page” for my organization in Facebook? Do I first need to create a group? I can’t find anywhere on the Facebook site where it gives any instructions and apparently I’m not quite cool or hip enough (yet!) to figure it out intuitively!!

A. You’re right: not about your lack of coolness or hipness, but about the relative obscurity of the method for creating a new Fan page for your brand. If you look at the bottom of any Facebook page, you’ll see an “Advertisers” link. When you click that, you will learn not only about Facebook’s advertising options, but also will see, on the right side, a description of Facebook Pages (along with a button you can click to create a new page.) Or if you want to take a shortcut, just click here.

This assumes you already have set up your own personal profile in Facebook. Someone has to be the administrator for the Fan page, so you can’t create a page until you have an individual profile.

This leads to a follow-up:

Q. I want to set up a page for my volunteer organization. Shouldn’t I just set up a separate profile for the organization (instead of a Page), so that when I rotate off the board someone else can take over? I don’t want to be forever connected to this Page through my Facebook account.

A. No. Individual profiles are for real people. Pages are for brands and organizations. Once you have created your organization’s Fan page, you can add others as administrators; for example, we have two administrators for the Mayo Clinic page. Be careful when adding administrators, though, because anyone who has admin rights can do everything with a page that you can, up to and including deleting the page. But when you leave the organization, you can just have yourself removed as an administrator for the page.

In a future post, I will go through the steps of creating a Facebook page as part of the Facebook curriculum. For now, hopefully the answers to these RAQs can help SMUGgles get started.

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Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

0 thoughts on “Chancellor RAQ: Creating Facebook Pages”

  1. What are the advantages of setting up a PAGE for an organization rather than just a “GROUP”? For instance, I am a youth volunteer leader at my church and use Facebook to link the students to events and provide a place for converstation, photos and movies.

  2. My workplace set up a page instead of a group because it seemed more suitable to our type of business (a performing arts center on a university campus). We felt that people would feel comfortable becoming fans of our page, whether they were students, faculty, staff, performers, or employees. If we had a group, people might think it was restricted to employees or performers.

    There are also some handy applications that can be added to a page but not a group. Our fans can post Reviews of performances, and our events are shown by an RSS reader. A lot of the other features are the same for pages and groups (photos, posted items, wall, etc). For comparison, here are links to our page and SMUG’s group:

    http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/Davis-CA/Robert-and-Margrit-Mondavi-Center-for-the-Performing-Arts/21080026255

    http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9613566511

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