How to Promote Your Web Site with Facebook

Another way to promote your developed web sites.

Big companies use fan pages on Facebook, and so should you. If you have a web site you actively promote, it makes sense to set up a fan page on the social network.

The benefit should be fairly clear, but at the simplest level a fan page allows you to “push” your message out to fans whenever you’d like. Think of it as if all of your fans subscribe to your RSS feed and an email newsletter. Whenever you want to promote something new on your site or make an announcement, you just update your fan page as you would your personal Facebook page. All of your fans get a notice in their feed. You can also send direct messages to your fans.

A few months ago I set up a fan page for my Lakeway web site, which you can see at Facebook.com/lakeway. I haven’t attempted to do much beyond the basics on the page; you can promote yourself heavily using widgets and other applications. But the page brings in a steady stream of traffic to Lakeway.com.

To start getting fans, set up your page and send fan requests to people on your friend list. This will get you started, but it may not be enough to get you to the elusive 100 fan mark, which is required to get a vanity URL for your fan page. To do this, I recommend using Facebook’s built in advertising option to promote your page. It’s like Google Adwords, except you target your ads to certain demographics, locations, and types of people on Facebook and invite them to join your page. In my tests over the past week, I was able to get fans for less than $1.00 each using the Facebook Ads system.