Can You Make Money With Facebook Fan Page Advertising?

The only way to make money directly from your Facebook fan page is to create a Facebook store. You can generate revenue from your fan page in ancillary ways, too. These include running ads that result in sales from your website or online store, or generating successful business leads for your company or product. Facebook does not offer the option to post external advertising on fan pages, so the only way to generate revenue from your page is to use it to drive the traffic to a landing page where you can convert visitors to buyers.

Online stores drive lots of traffic to their sites using social media. Facebook offers its own store options that are widely dubbed "f-commerce," which retailers use by uploading catalogs to the platform and creating Facebook buying apps or shopping carts. This is the most direct method of making money from your Facebook fan page, but as of 2012, the uptake on f-commerce remained low, partly because the apps were particularly slow compared with buying online on the retailer's own website. Companies with an online store or e-commerce presence can also use the social networking platform to drive qualified consumer traffic to their websites.

Use your Facebook fan page to generate interest in your company, products and services. The best opportunity for generating revenue is to have one of your fan page posts go viral, which means users share it exponentially with their Facebook friends. Post links to content such as video clips, photographs or controversial issues; publish details of a contest your fans can enter to win a prize, or invite followers to take part in an online discussion about a topic of mutual interest. Target followers with a call to action that takes them to your website's landing page or online store to buy an item advertised on your fan page.

Advertising and promoting your Facebook fan page can improve your number of "likes" and increase your audience for special offers and discount deals offered through your page. If you have a successful fan page with a large number of followers, you can monetize it by allowing companies offering related products and services to post on your page. This is particularly effective for small companies that have no strong Facebook presence. You can charge each company an advertising fee, or claim a percentage of the sales if you can find a way to monitor that. Facebook does not have an infrastructure to support this type of venture, so you will have to manage it in its entirety.

You can upload affiliate or referral links onto your Facebook fan page. Anyone who clicks on your links generates income for you, although it doesn't come directly from Facebook but from the affiliate site. Many fan pages allow links as a service offering to their followers. The downside is that you might lose followers if they feel that you are spamming them. Alternatively, you can create a YouTube account, upload video clips and add Google AdSense to the page, then promote the link to the video page on your Facebook fan page. Once again, this is not making money directly from Facebook because it goes through your AdSense account.