Facebook’s fan pages are easy to set up, but not so easy to master. Unfortunately, Facebook’s system for setting up and maintaining pages is needlessly complicated and sometimes buggy. It can be a little frustrating, but that’s the price of reaching a network of 300 million people. It’s worth the effort to put Facebook to work for your business. We can help:

1. Setting Up Your Page
Take your time while setting up a Facebook fan page. The category you choose at the very beginning is something you can’t change—unless you want to dump all your fans and start over. Different categories let you display different information (hours, parking and public transit options for a restaurant, mission and products for a website), so choose wisely. This site explains the differences.

Once you’ve picked your category and set up your page you can start adding basic info (most of this information will be in the “Info” tab that isn’t visible until a user clicks on it). You can also add a short bit of copy to the sidebar on your wall, which is an important place to give a basic overview of your business.

Like every other social networking site, your profile photo is an important branding opportunity. Facebook does zoom and crop images when it displays thumbnails, so it can be helpful to properly size your image so any important details aren’t cut out in thumbnails.

Take a look at the settings before you finish and make sure you’re comfortable with the default settings. By default Facebook fan pages are designed to be interactive, which means fans can post content on your wall. This is a great opportunity to hear from your customers, but you’ll probably want to keep an eye on it.

Don’t forget to publish your page when you’re ready to go live.

2. Status Updates
Status updates could be called the heart and soul of Facebook. Much like Twitter, these are the constant stream of updates that show up on the “wall” of a profile. Each user’s homepage shows a flood of status updates from their friends—so you can see what a vital opportunity these updates are to communicate and connect. Each status update can be commented on and “liked,” which gives ample opportunity for feedback.

It’s important to understand the place of status updates. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, which means quite a few status updates will come and go on their home page in any given day. The bottom line is that one or two status updates won’t change the world. You need to have consistent and quality updates to connect with people. And it doesn’t hurt to repeat an important update—don’t assume because you posted it once that people saw it (just don’t go overboard either).

Feel free to double up on your status updates. Facebook can automatically publish your updates to Twitter, and a number of applications can import Twitter updates to Facebook (though sorting out the best method can be complicated).

3. Applications
There’s an unending supply of applications to give more utility to your Facebook page. You can add extra tabs that contain unique content and post extra information in the sidebar of your wall. The applications can do things like post your Twitter feed, hold contests, conduct polls, play music and more. Not all of these will tie into your status updates, which means you’ll need to find ways to make sure your fans find them.

One of the standard applications you’ll want is Static FBML, which lets you add basic HTML. It’s very basic (javascript and iframes aren’t allowed), but you can add images and other extras to customize your page.

4. Importing Blog Content
You also have the option of importing blog content to your Facebook page. The easiest approach is to import the RSS feed of your blog using Facebook’s Notes. The upside is that it’s simple and easy, plus users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook. The downside is that users can read and comment on your entire post in Facebook without ever visiting your blog. Depending on your end goals that may be a problem.

There are also a number of third party applications that will import blogs. Some will display them in boxes on your page, which is less helpful because you’re relying on users to go looking for those boxes. Other applications (like RSS Graffiti) will import the blog content and post it as a status update, which delivers the content directly to your users.

5. Choose Where People Land
One thing you’ll notice is that each fan page has multiple tabs for content. You can add as many as you like and there is an option to change the default tab people first see when they view your page (Edit Page: Wall Settings: Edit). So you could build a custom tab introducing people to your brand instead of just sending them to your wall. Some folks have even experimented with using this functionality to show unique content to non-fans.

6. Communicate
One of the bonuses of the fan page is that you can send updates directly to all your fans (personal profiles can only send a message to a maximum of 20 friends at a time). These updates appear in a special tab in a user’s inbox, which mean they can be easy to miss. But these updates can also be targeted by location, age and gender. That’s a huge bit of demographic targeting courtesy of social networking.

7. Share More Content
Just like a personal profile, a fan page can add all sorts of extra content, like photos, videos, events and more. Default fan pages also come with a discussion board built in. Be sure to take advantage of these extra goodies and post some content, even if it’s just something fun. Make sure something appears on those extra tabs—if you don’t want any content there, consider removing the tabs so users won’t wonder why they’re empty.

8. Get a Custom URL
The first challenge when you launch your Facebook fan page is to secure a custom url. By default the link to each Facebook fan page is pretty ugly. But once you get 100 fans you can add your own custom url (http://www.facebook.com/yournamehere). You just need to cross that magic threshold.

9. Spread the Word
And the best way to cross that threshold to 100 fans is to spread the word. One quick way is to become a fan of your own page. That update will show up in your profile and other folks might see it and check it out. You can also suggest your page to friends and add the page to your favorites. From there you can go beyond Facebook and add a ‘fan box’ to your website that promotes your Facebook page. Consider promoting your Facebook page in other channels like a blog, e-mail newsletter, link on your website, etc. People can’t become a fan on Facebook if they don’t know you’re there.

10. Examples
Finally, it’s always worth checking out a few examples to see how some of the best are doing it. Take a look at some of these major Facebook pages to see what’s working for them:

• U2
• TOMS Shoes
• Apple Students
• Ford
• Mashable

You can also search for your competition and see if they have a presence on Facebook and if so what they’re doing. Also check out these five inspiring examples for more.

Now you can make the most of a Facebook fan page for your business.