Last week we published a very useful article for helping brands kickstart their Facebook Marketing. We loved your response and we’re going to keep the useful articles going.

“Setting up your Facebook Page” sounds mundane. I’m not denying that. But it’s more important than you probably think it is.

Facebook regularly iterates on its brand offerings and as a result, fan pages regularly undergo changes from its layout to privacy and usage rules. While setting up the fan page for 2 of my clients, I documented 7 important things in the fan pages that you might have missed.

1. Page Visibility

Your page is automatically published the minute you create it. I recommend that you first change your page’s visibility to “unpublished” so that you can make changes without anyone seeing them, especially if you’re managing an established brand.

2. Post Privacy Gating

This feature seems important and useful for delivering customised messages to different audience segments. Currently, the option is limited to demographic elements. Hopefully with more developments in Graph Search and how Facebook organises that data, we will see improvements in this feature. For now, customizing your messages according to demographic elements is as good as it gets.

3. Messages

Brands use this feature nowadays for customer service. Doing so fulfils a basic Customer Relationship Management (CRM) rule: It allows your customers to reach you where they are. In other words, if I come across your Facebook Fan Page and I have a question, I can direct you the enquiry on Facebook instead of writing in to you through email or going to your website to find a way to contact you. Frankly, redirecting me to another way to contact you gets as troublesome as reading that lengthy sentence.

As a result, your customers are more likely to develop positive impressions of your brand, or if it doesn’t, they will at least AVOID developing negative impressions of your brand. If you are considering whether having a customer service officer involved with your Facebook page is a good decision, this article on Social Media ROI may help you arrive at your decision.

4. Profanity Filter

I cannot think of many fan pages that would allow profanities on their Facebook Page, even for gags, jokes and puns. On the other hand, typos sometimes might result in incidental profanities. So I’d recommend that you set the sensitivity level to “Medium” instead of “Off” or “Strong”.

5. Similar Page Suggestions

Surely you would turn this on! It is akin to free advertisement and exposure for your fan page. The only drawback is that people who love to track everything (I’d like to call them the extremists) might be unable to find out exactly how many fans discovered, visited and liked their page via such placements and recommendations.

6. Page Info: Short Descriptions

Similar to your Twitter Bio, this short description should capture the essence of what your brand fan page is about. I’ve aggregated some of the good examples below:

7. Page Info: Long Descriptions

Don’t be misled by the subheading. As much as Facebook gives you the freedom to write an unlimited number of words in your page description, do remember that this description is still meant for your fans to read and digest. Key to deciding the length of your description lies in your copywriting skills. I’ve recommended this copywriting 101 guide by Copyblogger on several occasions to those who are new to writing online. If you can’t find the time to invest in reading the comprehensive guide, following this rule of thumb: keep to 3 concise sentences per paragraph, and write up to 3 such paragraphs.

All set?

When all you’ve gone through all the settings above, it should look a little like:

A little bonus tip before we proceed:

If you hover your mouse over the “More…” button, you’ll see a drop down menu with the word “Featured”. Click on that and you’ll see 2 subsections: “Likes” and “Page owners”. You can now add a human touch to your brand page by featuring one or more of your page administrators on your About Page. Doing so makes your brand feel more personable on Facebook, just like how thought leaders often advise brands to feature the person and not the brand logo behind the brand’s twitter account.

At last, it’s time to bring your focus back to preparing your editorial calendar. Like our updates so far? Stay tuned for our update next week.