This is Day 15 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
If you haven’t studied internet marketing then there’s a good chance you don’t know what a landing page is. If you already know what one is, congratulations, you are well ahead of most people. According to Wikipedia, a landing page, “is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.” Honestly, the Wikipedia definition isn’t the best one since there are new types of advertisements. The main point is that a landing page is where you capture a customer’s information or entice them to take another action (such as purchase a product). On Facebook, the action that you want the user to take is to become a fan.

Facebook previously had two places to become a fan but they have since reduced it to a single link at the top of a Page. When a person lands on your page you want to answer the following questions:

1. Who are you or what is your company?
2. Why should the user be interested in you or your company?
3. What will they get out of becoming a fan of your page?
4. Who’s in your community?

The fourth question is the most important thing and you can answer this question one of two ways: tell the user the type of people that you’d like as fans or let them just browse through your existing fans. The main point is that new users will be attracted to your Page based on your ability to attract others. If you only have a few fans, your landing page becomes even more important.

How To Create A New Tab

The easiest way to create a new tab within your Facebook Page is by using the Static FBML application. One downside of the Static FBML application is that you will need to understand a basic level of HTML. If you have no idea how to write HTML then you can use an application like Dreamweaver of Microsoft Frontpage to design your landing page and then copy the HTML that’s provided by the software.

5 Tips For Improving Your Landing Tab

While you can create a fairly effective landing tab by answering the questions I posted above, here are a few other tips that you should keep in mind:

1. Have a call to action – While you’ve educated your visitors about why they should joining your Facebook Page, you also need to encourage them to actually join your page. That’s what the call to action is for. If you view the AllFacebook page, you’ll notice that I’ve designed an image which says “Click on the ‘Become a fan’ button above” with an arrow pointing up toward the “Become a fan” button.
2. Write in the second person – Rather than writing about yourself and your company, talk about the person who you want to become a fan. Explain to them why they should join and the benefit (as outlined above in the four questions). Use the words “you” and “your” when writing your copy.
3. Place important parts at beginning and end – People tend to read the beginning and end of landing pages before reading the middle so you probably want to put your call to action early on and toward the end. Put the most important copy at the beginning or at the end.
4. Don’t link to other pages – If you want to get visitors to take an action (join your page), it’s a good idea to providing links that will drive them to other pages or other areas. Once they’ve navigated away from the tab or to another site, there’s a greater chance that you’ve lost them.
5. Perform some basic testing – While Facebook doesn’t currently provide metrics for where new fans came from, you can assume that all new fans have viewed your landing tab. Try making subtle adjustments to your landing tab and measure the difference in the number of new fans you receive each day. Ultimately I wouldn’t get overly invested in the testing process but it’s always a good idea to do at least a minimal level of testing.

Other Resources

There are numerous resources for learning about landing page optimization. While I don’t recommend becoming overly invested in learning about this topic (unless of course you want to study internet marketing), you should definitely check out Copyblogger’s landing page resources as well as checking out a few books on Amazon about landing page optimization. One really good book that I’ve used is “Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide To Testing And Tuning For Conversions” by Tim Ash.

Daily Task

Today’s task is to come up with the first version of copy that you are going to use for your Facebook landing tab. Over the next few days you can test out the HTML and more. If you already know HTML you should be able to come up with a top notch landing page in a few hours. While you can invest in beautiful design, you really don’t need to have it look that amazing.