Digital Caricatures, Facebook, and the New Media
Yes, they all have things in common! Near the beginning of this year, we created the Digital Blacksmiths fan page on Facebook and we’ve had a lot of fun with it.
In fact, about a month ago, we added a subdomain on our site that forwards visitors to the Facebook page (that subdomain is http://facebook.digitalblacksmiths.com).
This is a great way to maintain your brand as well as gives you a very slick tool for quick communication with many individuals.
Facebook gives us the ability, through fan pages, to create another channel for great conversations with clients, peers, and a growing audience. And this is a great place to have some of those conversations.
For example, we had a contest on our Facebook page where we gave away a Wacom Intuos digital tablet. Instead of having it hear on our own site, we chose to have the contest over there for the additional viral ability to spread info.
Since all fans receive updates, it is similar to the RSS feeds we’ve spoken highly of in the past in other articles here. Except with Facebook, it becomes analogous to the friend telling a friend telling a friend.
The only downside to this is that as of this writing, Facebook doesn’t allow custom urls*. So to make it easier for clients, peers, and others in our audience to find it, we created the autoforwarding subdomain.
This is relatively easy to create. Instead of just DigitalBlacksmiths.com, you create Facebook.DigitalBlacksmiths.com and then setup in your hosting settings page to make that domain forward to your actual Facebook page. I first heard about this great tip from the clever and innovative guys at Duct Tape Marketing.
Angie is using it to show off her digital caricatures. We are using it to have some great conversations. Others are using it for publicity.
Let us know how YOU use Facebook.
*UPDATE*
As of this summer, Facebook now allows custom URLs, provided that you have at least 100 fans for your Fan Page. Personal URLs are allowed as well.
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