What's the purpose of a FB Fan Page?

There are several reasons you may want to use a Facebook Fan Page:

Promotion of a product or service
Promoting a business or brand
Organizing an event

Caveman painting on his cave wall

Whatever the reason, it is important to remember that a Fan page simply provides a platform to connect and converse with customers and potential customers. The Fan Page provides a place for these direct relationships to exist. This is what makes a Fan Page exciting and gives it great potential, but with that potential, there is also some danger. By opening up this relationship, there is the possibility you will hear about problems with your product/event/brand. Before you launch a Fan Page, you should carefully consider at least the following:

How good is the product/service/company/brand? What's the ratio of happy customers to unhappy ones. If you don't think your customers are particularly happy, think twice before you open up this conversation with them in a very public place. You may want to shore up the product or brand before you venture out into a place where criticism can quickly snowball out of contrl.
Is Facebook the right social media platform for connecting with customers? Does it meet the right demographics of your customer base?
How much time do you have to invest? You will need to monitor and communicate regularly with the customers that engage with the page. You have to respond to both positive comments and negative. You want to foster and develop relationships with your fans way more than you deal with your detractors.
What do you hope to gain? Fan pages take careful management and persistent attention. Are you just opening a channel of communication? Are you hoping to get new customers? Do you want to inform current customers about new products or services to increase revenues? Your Fan Page strategy should be aligned to what you hope to gain from a fan page.
What do your Page fans actually want? It will be worth a little listening to your customers to find out how they would want to use a Fan page. If your strategy is not aligned with your customers' perceived use, this can be problematic too.
Is the rest of your company/organization on board? Before you launch a fan page, there should be a clear strategy, a clear plan of engagement, a clear posting strategy, and buy-in from the executive team.

Now, after reading this, you may be thinking twice about whether you're ready to start a Fan Page. That's okay. While we'll go over how to do it on the next page, there are plenty of activities that involve observing existing fan pages, and creating a fan page is not required.