How to Create an Engaging Facebook Welcome Page for your Software Business

Everyone wants to make a good first impression, right? If you have a brick and mortar building for your business, you want visitors to feel welcomed as soon as they come through the door. The same is true for online landing and welcome pages – you want the individual to be attracted enough to stay on the page, and interested enough to either leave you their email address immediately, or start engaging with your business in some way.

Items to include on a landing page:

• Call to action – do you want people to ‘like’ you, join your mailing list, answer a question, or something else?
• Clear benefit or incentive for person to respond to the call to action (for instance, a 30% off coupon for a product or service; early bird offer; instant updates)
• Links (no more than 3) to detailed information about your services. Link to your a short video you’ve created, a specific product page, or your website, as examples
• Personal touch that lets the person know there are people behind the company (for example, headshots of relevant team members, or of the people managing the page; use of “you” and “your” in the text instead of “we”)
• Bulleted lists if there is a lot of content to read. In today’s fast-paced world, people don’t want to take the time to read paragraph of information, so make short, relevant points they can scan.
• Visual appeal so that the eyes want to stay on the page, you want colors that are easy on the eyes and text fonts that are easy to read

When you have a landing page that combines a clear call-to-action with a very clear incentive for someone to like your business page, you gain a lot of traction to building attention quickly.
Once you have a welcome page you’re happy with, don’t stop there. Refresh the content at least every few weeks. Experiment with placement of content and see if you get more responses to your call-to-action when content moves from one location to another.
Another way to think about the Facebook welcome page is it can be a mini version of your website’s landing page.
The number of Facebook users is over 845 million, so if you can create and promote an engaging landing page, you’ll have access to a lot of potential customers who aren’t congregated anywhere else as productively.
And Facebook has an analytics tool called Facebook Insights so you can track metrics on who is engaging with you, their demographics, who they are sharing your content with, and more. With the tool, you’ll be able to know if you’re tracking toward the social media goals your company has set.
Of course you can hire out to create your welcome page, but if you want to try it yourself, here are a few tools you can investigate:

• Pagemodo.com – This free tool offers “a wide variety of gorgeous and customizable templates, easy-to-add features like slideshows, videos, contact forms, and maps, and powerful social media tools like fan coupons and ‘like’ gates.”
• Wildfire Social Media Marketing – Wildfire is offering a free iFrame application to help with designing a welcome page. This may be a temporary free offer, so check it out as soon as you can.
• iwipa.com – This free tool is inside Facebook. So you click this link, sign onto Facebook, and you’re ready to install the application, or read more about it. It’s a great marketing tool at a minimum – the company helps you set up your own page by having you interact with its page.
• HyperArts Blog – This blog is loaded with information for do-it-yourselfers. It is loaded with tutorials for the development of Facebook business pages. Everything appears to be free, so time invested should only be in how quickly you read and can apply the information.

By Wendy Thomas

http://software.intel.com