Five more Facebook questions answered

1. Can Facebook close your account?

Yes. You can see what you’re signing up to when using Facebook by looking at their terms found here, these cover everything you need to know with links to other terms, plus a list of when Facebook may terminate your account.

If you have a Facebook page the terms are here, however these say you need to be an official representative of the business to have the page, and that you must abide by the other terms. You should also be aware of the Facebook promotional guidelines, in regards to competitions, as these are pretty strict.

2. How do you view demographics on your page?

There are two ways to view the demographics about who likes your page:
a) Go to your page, and you will see a box called insights (only page admins see this). In the right hand corner of the box it will say “see all” click on this to see your info.
b) Go to www.Facebook.com/insights

3. Do you have to pay for traffic analytics?

No. All the demographics of who visits your page are provided free by Facebook, if you want more detailed information than they give you, then you can use tools such as Google Analytics (the same as is used on a website) and add them to your Facebook page.

4. When I set up my FB page I didn’t list it as a business, I set it up as an artist… does that matter?

No. It is best to try and set up your Facebook page in the closest category at the start as you can’t change it later. The reason is that when people search for a page often there are thousands of results for pages with similar names, and they can use the category drop down selection as a way to narrow the search, and therefore make your page easier to find.

5. Does it cost money to have these applications/promotions/competitions on the FBML tab?

This is a “how long is a piece of string?” question. If you are an IT geekoid, then no it costs nothing, if you can follow instructions then most of it you can do yourself, it really depends on what you want to do and how whizz bang you want it to be.

Think of Facebook like any marketing tool, for example you can easily send out an email to clients, but if you want it to look good you might have to pay people to do that for you. To add the FMBL tab it’s free, however creating content and images is the same as any other marketing, dependant on what you want to achieve and how much cash you have to spend.

Lara Solomon is the founder of Mocks, mobile phone socks www.MyMocks.com, founder of Social Rabbit – your guide in the world of social media www.Facebook.com/SocialRabbit and author of ‘Brand New Day – the Highs & Lows of Starting a Small Business’. Lara’s business LaRoo was the winner of the NSW Telstra Micro-Business Award in 2008.