A Facebook Fan Page is a simple addition to your company’s online portfolio. Within a few minutes you can have the basic Page which lets you post images, video, or just communicate with your customers via the wall; however, with a little bit more effort, your Page can reflect the online branding that your company has spent time and effort on with your own website.

The easiest way to add your own personal look to your Page is through the Static FBML application. FBML (Facebook Markup Language) is an extension of HTML, so you can quickly bring static sections of your website into your Facebook profile. Though the instructions below may seem daunting, follow closely (or call us) and it will all become clear.

The first step to adding a new Static FBML tab is to simply add the application to your Page. Go to the application page, and click on the “Add to my Page” link.

From here, you’ll be presented with a pop-up asking which Page to add the application. (Note: if you only have 1 Page, you may not be prompted for this.)

The application is now added to your Page, but to actually do anything with it, you’ll need to go back and edit.

Scroll down to your list of applications and look for the FBML app. Click “edit”  one more time, and you’ll be presented with the actual FBML tab code page.

Here’s where we give our tab a name. In my case I’m moving our team page, so I’ll name the tab “Team,” and then paste in the HTML content from our website that I want on our tab. As you can see, I’ve also linked to the stylesheet from our main site. I’ve also made a special copy and added “-fb” to the name just in case I want to make Facebook-specific tweaks to the styling without mucking around in the master.

Once we’re done, we can scroll to the bottom of the page and click the save button. If we wanted to add more tabs we’d click the link below and more copies of the FBML app would show up in our application list. Clicking the “Application Settings” link brings up a pretty simple dialog box. Here we want to make sure that the “tab” is added, and the “box” is removed.

Navigate back to our Fan Page, and now we just have to find our new tab and drag it to where we want it in our navigation. Since our team is what makes Catchfire Media great, we want to bring this tab close to the beginning of our nav strip. Drag and drop it where we want it, and we’re done.

That’s it; now we have a nice part of our website inside our Facebook presence. See the results below, or on the <a href=”http://www.facebook.com/catchfiremedia?v=app_6009294086“>facebook tab itself</a>.

Here are a couple of closing tips that will save you some headaches while building your first few tabs.

1. Facebook caches your offsite CSS and images, so if you makes a change to either you need to force facebook to grab the new copies. You do this with a little trick called “cache busting.” In your src or href parameter, add a version number and increment it when you have a new version. So, <link href=”css/style-fb.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” /> becomes <link href=”css/style-fb.css?v=1″ rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” />. The next time you make a change to your stylesheet simply change “v=1” to “v=2” and save your tab. This will force Facebook will fetch your new copy.
2. Facebook has long threatened to change the width of tabs to 520 pixels so that they can add the left sidebar that currently only exists on the wall tab to all the tabs. I personally don’t foresee this happening anytime soon, because many companies have time and money invested in their Facebook presences (this would force them to rewrite a lot of content). It’s probably safest to either code your tabs so that they’re 520 pixels wide, or scale down to that width without trouble.

There you have it, a simple way to bring your brand to your customers within Facebook without expending too much time or effort. If you’d like help with this sort of branding effort, Catchfire Media would be glad to help you out.

Do you maintain a Facebook Fan Page? Are you currently mirroring content from your own website in FBML tabs within Facebook? What do you think of this low-barrier method for jumping into Facebook?

In addition to experiencing the nation-wide beard trend, our two days at the South by Southwest Interactive conference allowed us to see the latest in social web innovation and gave us the opportunity to hear from some major thought leaders in the space. We sat through presentations from such luminaries as Twitter CEO Evan Williams and social media wine celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk. More importantly, we met potential future stars developing exciting social platforms and technologies. What follows is a list of key takeaways, many of which we, Senior Analyst Jarad Bernstein and Analyst Abby Harvey, will be expanding upon in future posts.

Every guy is growing a beard these days
From interesting mustaches to completely-covered faces, there was no shortage of facial hair at SXSW Interactive. What does this say about the direction we are heading? We’ll leave that to a later post, but regardless we think you should be aware of this trend.

Customer service rules the world
Gary Vaynerchuk couldn’t talk enough about the importance of caring for and about your customer. Customer service’s importance should be obvious to end users (which we all are), but why doesn’t every company get this? Simply put, everyone wants to be treated like a human being. In Gary’s words, “You can’t scale caring . . . you can’t scale authenticity.” Gary told the crowd that you need to start caring about your customers, or you will lose. Of course, he made this point more passionately—it wouldn’t be a true Gary Vaynerchuk show without a few hundred expletives sprinkled in. In Gary’s world caring is swearing, and Gary cares more than most.

Another main takeaway from Gary’s performance: utilizing social media and the web is a must, and do it now! “This platform [the internet] is a BABY!” he proclaimed. “You [SXSW Interactive attendees] have no idea how ahead of the rest of the world you are; there’s a massive amount of low-hanging fruit, and people are starting to eat the grapes.” Effectively incorporating a web presence hinges on every part of today’s business model—marketing, advertising, sales, and customer service.

Being CEO of Twitter doesn’t mean you are a good public speaker
The hype for Monday’s keynote presentation was palpable. Overflow rooms with giant projection screens filled up equally as fast as the cavernous main hall. We were all anticipating an announcement on the scale of Steve Jobs letting the world in on the next big thing; instead, we bore witness to a dull conversation with Twitter CEO Evan Williams about one of the most exciting technologies Twitter has developed to date—At Anywhere (@anywhere).

Geolocation is more than just Foursquare and similar services
We’ve come a long way from the original Magellan in-car navigation device—a topic expanded upon in two sessions we attended. Geolocation and Location-Based Services (LBS) are growing rapidly; in fact, we learned that global LBS-spending is forecasted to exceed $7 billion by 2013 (yes, that’s less than three years away!). In one session, speaker Jason Finkelstein of WaveMarket, Inc. talked about mobile geolocation developments and shared one of his favorite quotes from Google: “The future of mobile is local.” One interesting stat he shared with us, which we are still thinking about: 55 percent of all text messages ask some form of the question “where r u?” That’s 650 billion location-based texts in the U.S. last year alone. Look at your text message log in your cell phone and we think you’ll realize the truth in these numbers. What are WaveMarket and its competitors planning to do about this? Nothing earth-shattering was shared, but we certainly look forward to their innovations.

While in some cases geolocation rears its head as creepy, clearly causing negative sentiment, it’s hard to deny its importance. Geolocation takes the guesswork out of all those inquisitive, location-based text messages. The company that creates a solution that is both secure and useful will likely profit quite well.

Coming soon
Want to learn more about our takeaways? Our next few posts will focus on the future of open APIs, music sharing, digital magazines, social media in health care, and more. Every session had a hash tag assigned to it, and we have linked to the search results for those hashtags so you can learn from other attendees, as well. One final statistic for this post: registration was up substantially at SXSW Interactive compared to 2009. One rumor even has it that the interactive festival outdrew the music festival for the first time ever. With social media playing a central role in the festival and its growth, we know that social media is not done growing and changing the way we view communications.

Colleges and universities indubitably benefit from utilizing social media tools, and in most departments, the reasons are obvious: broad exposure and information transfer for admissions, game promotion for athletics, and über-connectivity for alumni relations. Some institutions are also allowing social media to creep into the classroom—and for good reason.

“Social media tools, like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, are key to communicating with this generation of students,” stated Joyce Smith, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “While still no substitute for face-to-face interaction, social media have opened lines of communication and inquiry for both students and institutions that were inconceivable only a decade ago.”

From YouTube and iTunes to Facebook and Twitter, social media has created a new attitude towards teaching and towards the learning experience in general.

YouTube, for example, recently expanded to allow colleges and universities to create their own “channels” on YouTube EDU. Faculty and staff use these personal pages to post lectures, guest speakers, events, etc. For many participating professors, speaking to an unseen audience on camera prompts them to strive for a more engaging, interesting lecture. On the same note, iTunes also has a brilliant new outlet for colleges and universities called iTunes U. It provides free lectures, audiobooks, etc. all downloadable to your Mp3 player, mobile phone, or computer, and over 70 academic institutions are already participating!

Another development in the audio/video world is a little gem called Livestream, which delivers live content in real-time to client computers. Universities are using this platform not only to satiate information-hungry alumni with live lectures and readings, but also as an option with which to base assignments.

Some colleges and universities are also utilizing Twitter and Facebook as a new way to communicate out of the classroom. One Illinois State University technology instructor even required his students to “friend him” on Facebook. While some feel that required “friending” crosses the line, it’s hard to deny its usefulness. Students can post questions on their professors’ walls; professors can post assignments on their own profiles, or even to their students’; and if online at the same time as the professor, students can chat live about assignments.

How would you feel about a professor contacting you via Facebook? Do you think that utilizing YouTube EDU, iTunes U, or Livestream for assignments, lectures, readings, etc. is a good idea?

[Photo from _dchris on Flickr / CC BY 2.0]