A client asked the following question:

In your opinion, what are the best practices for setting up a business Facebook account?  What is your advice for the best app for creating a Welcome Page? for event listings?

Here’s my answer:

A lot of businesses make the default tab a welcome page with special offers, testimonials, graphics, and so forth. While this is a great way to focus visitors attention on your products or services, more and more businesses are using Facebook to build brand identity – focusing more on interactions with users. For this reason, many pages make the default tab the Wall or Discussion Boards, so that when a user visits the page, they see what others are saying about the business and its products and services – positive reviews, stories about how they use a product, etc. (Smaller businesses can solicit this kind of content with contests: “five randomly selected fans who post their first memory of Product X on our Wall during November will win a $20 Amazon gift card”.) This approach makes the page seem less like just another marketing channel, and more like a community of people who appreciate the business or product.

However, if you determine that having a custom welcome page is best for your business, there are many apps that will do this for you. One that I’ve used in the past is TabPress: it’s free and lets you display custom HTML (including images and links) to visitors. You can display different content to people who already like your page, vs. people who have not yet liked it.

As far as event listings, again there are many Facebook apps that add this functionality. Facebook’s built-in Events app may do the trick, or you can use a more advanced calendar app like Events Calendar.

Recently, Twitter has been having some reliability issues. Errors, tweet counts, follow counts, and fail whales have been more the rule than the exception in the last two weeks. Twitter says that this is due to problems in their internal network structure which have been exacerbated by heavy tweeting on the World Cup.

Such widespread, long term outages are a bit uncommon for a web service, but who can complain, seeing as Twitter is a free service? It does raise an issue though: what if you rely on Twitter as a primary means of communicating with your clients and supporters? Do you have a backup system in place?

Possibilities are many: sending updates from a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile, a FriendFeed account, or with Friendster. Obviously you don’t need them all, but having one or two alternatives is just good planning.

And remember to promote all your social media channels on your website!