I recently wrote about an interesting article that is being featured in the March 2010 edition of Harvard Business Review that studied Facebook Fan pages. Research for the article, “How Effective is Facebook Marketing?”, was conducted by Utpal Dholakia, associate professor of management at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Emily Durham, a Jones School alumna and founder of Restaurant Connections, a Houston-based restaurant consultancy. The results of the study indicate that Facebook fan pages provide an effective and low-cost way of social media marketing.

Facebook Fan pages are different than “being on Facebook” and having your own personalized User ID on there. Facebook Fan pages are different, and they’re essentially a type of interactive “web page” that are on Facebook. Each Facebook fan page has to have a User ID associated with it as an “admin” or “administrator” of that Facebook Fan page. Take a look at the search results on Facebook for “Matt Cutts” (Mr. Cutts is the head of Search Spam at Google):

If you look at the search results for “Matt Cutts”, the Matt Cutts Facebook Fan Page that I created a while back is shown at the top of the list. Certainly there is an algorithm for why one Facebook Fan Page appears first versus second or further down the list. But what’s important to understand here is that a Facebook Fan page is different than your actual personal Facebook page. So let’s take a look at the actual Facebook Fan page I created a while back for Matt Cutts:

If you are creating a Facebook Fan page either for yourself (wow, that’s incredibly vain, right?) or for your business, there are elements that you need to add. First, make sure that you have plenty of “eye candy” on there. If possible, add as many photos and videos on there, as well. If there is a website or blog associated with the business, you will want to add some content from that and link out to it.

What’s important to note, though, is that you are going to be the administrator of that Facebook Fan page. The administrator (Facebook refers to it as the “admin” of the page) has the rights to edit the page and to add and remove content on that page. In order to “protect” your Facebook Fan Page, it’s absolutely imperative that you have more than one “admin” of the page. I recently experienced a situation where an important Facebook Fan Page for a large business was disabled “automatically” by Facebook’s internal system. Apparently Facebook has safeguards in place that will automatically disable Facebook Fan Pages if certain activity occurs and there is only one admin of that Facebook Fan Page. Certainly if you want to protect your Facebook Fan page it’s extremely critical that more than one admin is assigned to the page.