A fellow blogger, Nick O'Neill posted a great entry about the benefits of a branded Facebook Page for your product or service.

Over the past few years Facebook has witnessed a dramatic rise in new user adoption and with that rise has come the opportunity for brands to interact directly with existing customers and engage new ones. There are many ways for brands to leverage Facebook but the overall branded experience is easily integrated into a single offering with a Facebook Page.


So, what are the benefits of a Facebook Profile Page?

1. Pages Are Profiles for Brands
The easiest way to understand a Facebook Page for your brand is to view it as a “Profile for Brands”. This means brand pages can essentially do everything that users can do but it is tied directly to your product/brand.

2. Pages Have Access to Users’ Feeds
This is probably the single most important feature within the new Facebook Pages product. Many in the press have described this as Twitter for Facebook. When Facebook users become a “fan” of your branded page, they will be notified of your status updates anytime you update the status on your brand page, via the primary news feed on the homepage.

3. The News Feed is Now Real Time
The news feed has been redesigned to stream stories instead displaying the automatically filtered stories as “Highlights” on the right hand side of the page.

4. Pages Can Integrate Multiple Applications
There is space to integrate applications that are just as robust as those with standalone canvas pages. Not sure of what “canvas pages” are? A canvas page is the space in Facebook below the Facebook header and to the left of Facebook’s sidebar ads. Essentially you can now post applications which take up the full width of the page. Below is an example of the canvas area. Contact BAM!apps.com for your fully customizable application templates - No coding or hosting. They do it all for you.

















5. Brands Can Join the Conversation
Social media has always been about joining the conversation and for the first time ever on Facebook, brands can now be a significant part of the conversation. These conversations can take place within a Facebook Page as well as in a user’s news feed. I can’t emphasize how important joining the conversation is. While your social media strategy should continue to include other outlets (blogs, Twitter, etc), Facebook should now attract much more attention because of the potential for conversation.