This is an example of what your Facebook Fan Page will look like if you follow these directions (Click to see it live)

Facebook is currently the second largest website in the world. Next to Google, it can be a very powerful source. The great thing about Facebook is it’s price, which is free.

This post is designed to help internet sales managers beef up their fan and inventory pages. Before I proceed, I want to share the numbers that Facebook shares on their press page.

• Facebook has more than 400 million active users
• Half of them log on to Facebook EVERY DAY
• More than 35 million people update their Facebook Pages every day
• A total of 60 million updates occur every day on Facebook
• There are over 3 billion photos uploaded to Facebook every month
• More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
• Only 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook
• More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
• Average Facebook user has 130 friends
• Average user sends 8 friend requests per month
• Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook WOW!
• Average user writes 25 comments on Facebook content each month
• Average user becomes a fan of 4 Pages each month
• There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

I really hope you’re getting the big picture by now. Facebook is a great way of networking, and if everyone at your car dealership gets involved you could see a spike in sales.

Think about this. Besides your internet department, you have numerous amounts of sales people. Chances are, many of them have personal Facebook pages. As the stats above mentioned, the average Facebook user has 130 friends. If your dealership has a team of  10 salespeople and they all get involved, this will result in your inventory being displayed to 1,300 different people every week. The great thing is these aren’t just “people”, they are friends of your sales staff.

There are many conflicting ideas from social media sales consultants as how a dealer should utilize Facebook. Many feel they should simply have a tab on their Facebook Fan Page to display a link to their inventory.

I strongly disagree with this. The problem is simple. When you build a Fan Page the hardest thing is to obtain fans. Let’s say you work hard and get yourself 300 fans. How do you plan on getting them to come back to look at your inventory? You are forced to send them all emails when you have something cool to share. But, how often is that? Weekly, monthly?

This is why I am a big fan of inventory status updates. Most car dealers update their inventory on a weekly basis. If you automated your new inventory with your status updates, your inventory will be in the face of those 1,300 people plus all of your Facebook Fans every single week.

Whichever Facebook solution you like best, I will show you how to do it. I would recommend using both methods.

Facebook Directions:

1) Before we even start with your inventory, let’s beef up your page a bit. Facebook allows your image to be 200 pixels wide by 494 pixels tall. If you have access to Photoshop or Gimp, you can easily do this yourself. Gimp is a free open source graphics editor, and you can download it here.

Note how Park Automall took advantage of this taller image: Park Automall’s Facebook Fan Page

2) Now lets work on your inventory tab. This particular dealer likes to promote just one vehicle, with hopes that they will click to the website. If a user clicks any of the smaller images that is exactly what will happen. The visitor will now be on their microsite.

The first step is to add the tab to your Facebook Page. Here are some easy directions:

1. Log on to your Facebook account. If you’re adding this to your fan page, go to that page.
2. In the Facebook search page, search for Static FBML, then click the Static FBML application link (or click here)
3. Now click the “view application” link on the right.
4. Close to the top on the left hand side (under the little logo), click “add to my page”.
5. The box that appears will show you your personal page, and any Fan Pages you are an administrator of. Click your desired account.
6. Now you can simply go to that page and click “edit page” on the left.
7. Scroll down a bit and you will see FBML listed under application. Click “edit”.
8. Now you will see a big empty box. In the small field on the top, name it accordingly. Whatever you call it is what the tab will be named when viewing your page.

This large box is for FBML Code. Known as Facebook Markup Language, it is very similar to HTML. If you ever built websites in the 90’s using Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver, you will find those programs once again to be very helpful. So now, you have 3 choices:

1. Use your Craiglist Posting Tool if you have one. Copy the code to your clipboard and simpleypaste it into the box (press control and “V” or right click over box and click “paste”). There is one number you will need to find and change. You want the page to fit on your Facebook Page, so you will have to find it and change it yourself. In this case, it was towards the top of our code that the Showroom Logic tool generates. By default it was “750″, meaning 750 pixels wide. I manually changed this to “550″. 550 pixels is the perfect width for your Facebook page.
   

   This example shows that your FBML code will look like

2. Use an old version of Microsoft Frontpage or something similar. Generate your own html and paste it into the box. Remember, you won’t be able to upload any images, so be sure to properly link to any images you include.
   

   Here is an easier example. I hosted this image on a Wordpress Blog. Click to see the Dealers Fan Page)

3. Use an online WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get”. There are many free ones online, including this one. Play around with it. When your done, click source on the top left of the box and copy that code. Now paste it into your FBML box.

Click save and you’re done! Now test it out. This is what ours looks likes when finished:

The Finished Product. When any thumbnail is clicked, the user is now on your website!

So that wasn’t so hard was it? Now let’s create status updates with your inventory and or blog posts. I like this feature because it updates other people’s walls as well, and it’s great in your face advertising.

This can be done on a personal Facebook Page or a Fan Page. There are 2 ways to accomplish this. If you want to use a free third party application like RSS Graffiti, you can read about that here.

Otherwise, you can utilize your “notes” feature on Facebook. Ultimately your Facebook Fan Page will look like this:

This is an example of what your Facebook Fan Page will look like if you follow these directions (Click to see it live)

The important thing to note is the fact that these updates will also appears on your Fan’s wall.

So, let’s do it:

1. Be sure you are logged into Facebook, and click here.
2. Simply copy your RSS Feed url and paste it into this box. That’s it! Save it and your done.

This example shows how we mashed 6 different RSS Feeds into 1 using Yahoo Pipes

We go a bit further with our clients, and you can do this yourself as well. We not only include their inventory, but their blogs. To accomplish this from more than one source, just create a Yahoo Pipes Account and you can mash 2 or more RSS feeds into one. For Napleton, we use their inventory RSS, and 2 different blog RSS feeds. You can even include your YouTube RSS feeds!

Just play around with pipes for a while, you should be able to figure it out. After you mash them together, Yahoo Pipes will give output one RSS Feed for you to paste in your Facebook Notes section.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment below. Private questions can be sent to mike@showroomlogic.com.