The good: Facebook is a great way for Interior Designers to target their chosen demographic markets.
The bad: Facebook is given little thought by many interior designers when considering how to market
The ugly: Facebook itself is a bit of a nightmare when it comes to organising your fan page just how you would like it. Whilst using it IS relatively intuitive to use, the act of making/building your fan page is a minefield of inconsistency and counter intuition on Facebook’s part – truly awful AND it is not going to improve anytime soon.

Let’s start. Facebook, by default, will not do all the bits that I would imagine you would probably want it to do. After you have created a basic page for the first time you will probably struggle to figure out how to make it just right. You may well get confused and frustrated, I know I did. Then you will figure out that actually it’s not possible to do what you want to do on a default Facebook Fan Page. You will need to use Facebook Applications to change various bits of the page. There are a plethora of these applications, I’ll tell you the ones you need to know to produce a reasonable stab at a first IMPROVEMENT over what you already have.

OK here are the various key parts of the page that you will have to alter and work with (point number 1 you should already have done yourself). I list the parts of the screen first and then tell you afterwards what to do about each.

1. Get your business name and image added to the top left hand corner. Add you contact details and the like to the info tab.

2. Your vanity url eg KOTHEA’s is www.facebook.com/kothea. Here is a blog post I wrote earlier on this potentially tricky subject.

3. If you have read all our posts over the last year or so you will know that we keep saying GET A BLOG AND WRITE EVERY WEEK. I won’t dwell on the subject, you just need to do it for a plethora of reasons. However once you have a blog you will need to put it on Facebook as well as where you originally write it. you will need to use an application to avoid duplicating your effort. Like This.

4. Tabs. You will need to add new tabs containing the information about your organisation that you consider relevent. e.g. compare   this “traditional info” tab to this “additional info” tab . (Traditional vs. Additional). The frist one is from Pepsi and at first you might think what a poor show they have made of the tab. They have not. the problem is facebook. pepsi put the minimum amount of information on a page that Facebook says you have to have. Then, like KOTHEA, we put all the juicy bits onto another tab that we have control of. Far from perfect but that’s life.

5. Then you will want to customise the bits in the left hand side column. Again, www.facebook.com/kothea shows you some buttons we added on the left hand side to link to our twitter account, our real blog, our flickr feed and a final button to prompt an action to contact us via our real web page. You get the idea and can probably see scope to add many more buttons or actions or images that we have not considered.

How do I do those 5 things?:

1. You should have figured this bit out yourself. on your fan page just look for a mini “pencil” like image appearing near the bit you want to change. click it and change it. Get a nice big logo on there.

2. I refer again to this post <here>.

3. A Facebook application called SOCIAL RSS is used by about 500,000 people. This is how you get the RSS feed of your blog onto a new Facebook Tab. Just click the “Go To Application” button on the top left hand corner. It’s free and it works. There is also a slightly better/faster paid-for version, probably not worth the extra yet.

4. For an “extended info tab” you will need the aptly named EXTENDED INFO APPLICATION – click to go there. Again it is free. Here is KOTHEA’s example. The application works by creating a BLANK TAB, you then use the application to create all the fields (bits) on it. It is NOT straightforward to use. I would say 3/10 difficulty (with 10/10 being impossible). So persevere and you will get there.

5. To create new fields on the left hand side Facebook have kindly produced the Static FBML application. Click here to go to the page and add the application to your profile with the button in the top left hand corner. FBML is a bit like HTML. So if you do not know any html you will find this DIFFICULT (9/10). But if you already know HTML then Facebook and their application will only confuse you for a little while before you figure it out (3/10). I would imagine that with FBML you can give your Facebook fan page a similar look and feel to your web site – if you really want to do that.

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OK so you’ve decided to raise your business profile by blogging at least weekly. It will boost your brand awareness in your customers’ eyes and also, eventually, help your position in the results of google searches.

Unfortunately after a few weeks you run out of things to write.

So…

DESIGNERS: “WHAT DO I BLOG ABOUT?”

Let’s go.

1. Original content. Whatever it is it MUST be original. If you copy articles or republish them Google ‘knows’ that. It won’t help you one jot in your position in search results.  It might be of some benefit to your readership though but why not just post the link to the information preceded by your professional opinion about what is in the link and why is worth visiting? Add value, don’t plagiarise.

2. Apple iPHONES? So many people blog about technology and how wonderful it is. Perhaps, I would suggest, many of those conversations don’t get far over the dinner table or at parties. Why? Mainly because they are of limited interest. And, let’s face it, those discussing technology just use the technology they don’t actually invent the darn thing! HOWEVER you design amazing interiors for houses. That’s interesting to many people, they live in them funnily enough, it is an area that is very interesting to many people. So talk about your job, its one of the few jobs that people envy and are interested in. Don’t be embarrassed!

3. So blog about your last job. More importantly make your last job into several blog posts. Focus on specific aspects of about 200-300 words for each post. Talk about; products, services your approach to the project, what your client thought, how good certain contractors were. Honestly you could go on for a few months based on one project alone (remember short posts with images ideally).

4. Talk about design in general. What’s good, what’s not. And I want to hear YOUR GENUINE opinion please, not a re-hashed version of something that someone told you was “cutting edge design”. True originality and creativity is rare -people with money want to buy that (oh yes, that’s right they are your potential customers).

5. Trends. At the turn of the year I found VERY few designers talking about trends for the year ahead. And many of them were just rehashing colour trends produced by paint maker Farrow and Ball (or whoever it was). YAWN. So who is one of the most sought after media-savvy interior designers in the UK…Kelly Hoppen. Look here, she gives her professional opinion on the year ahead and writes in an engaging way. Trends are one of the easiest things to write about and few of you (with notable exceptions)  did it. Great job Kelly!

6. PLEASE think about your readers. Do NOT write something that will be of interest to all your staff. Why? They are not your customers. Write about something that your customers might be interested in. So we, KOTHEA, sell great fabrics to interior designers but I don’t tend to talk about that. I talk in this blog about stuff that might help you make more money (eventually) by doing better business. Eventually KOTHEA will stick in your brain and you will buy some of our fabrics!

Share and enjoy!