Let’s look at some of the top reasons why Tallahassee businesses would want to use a ‘FAN’ page on Facebook:

• unlimited membership – profiles or groups are capped at 5000
• administrators appear as the business when posting – so you can have multiple admins and they can all be posting as the business
• indexed by external search engines (Google, etc.) – one of my favorites!
• can host applications – once you get the basics of Facebook, having a more interactive fan page is a must and the ability to host applications is important
• enables analytics and tracking – you get detailed statistics on who ‘LIKE’s your business, the age and sex demographics, etc.
• resembles a regular profile page – and function like profile pages too!

Now let’s look at some of the reasons why businesses might choose a ‘GROUP’ page on Facebook:

Have more control over who joins by setting for member approval.
Can be ‘private’ thus creating a more ‘secure’ environment for sharing.

Now obviously, the choice for Tallahassee businesses is Facebook fan pages.

The BIGGEST reason to choose a fan page is that the updates you make to your business fan page appear in the news stream of your fans so they can instantly react and INTERACT with you and your business!

While both Fan and Group pages can be beneficial in certain instances, overall the Fan Page is far superior to the Group Page when it comes to maximizing a brand’s Facebook presence.

• Links – check your links to ensure that they are still live.    This would refer to both links that point to other pages within your web site and then also links that point to pages that are not on your web site.   Hopefully your internal links will not be an issue, but linking to external sites could be problematic because other web sites might change their site structure periodically and your links might need to be updated.

• Mobile Phones – since just about everyone has a mobile phone, you should be checking your site on a regular basis on multiple mobile phones to ensure that your site is visible and functions properly in the mobile environment.

• Analytics – this should be done at least every 30 days.   You should always be looking at analytics so you know where your site visitors are coming from and how they are finding you.    I know that approximately 40% of traffic to design850.com and I can see how that is changing every month (or week in my case).  I also can know what other sites are driving the most traffic to my site.

• Newsletters/Forms – you should be testing your forms on a regular basis to ensure that the emails are getting through to you and to also know what the end user receives if they sign up for your newsletter or send a request through your contact form.

• Images – the last item that you should check on a regular basis is that the images that you have on your site all load correctly.   This is especially true if you have any sort of online store where the images are a necessary part of your ability to conduct business.