Last night I had the pleasure of speaking at the Facebook Developer Garage hosted at The Sullivan Room. This meant a lot to me as I had spoken at the very first Garage here in New York two years ago hyping up the newly developed The Lotto application that we had built and wanted to meet with the up and comers. In fact, it’s where I met a former Carrot employee and one of my closest friends today.

Last night, when the opportunity to speak came about we jumped on it immediately. Sure, we knew everyone would be talking about Facebook Connect, the API…all the stuff developers want to know. But, from a business standpoint, the conversations we are having with brands and the need for custom Fan Pages is a topic that needed to be discussed.

Fan Pages are so important. We’ve blogged about them here. I’ve tweeted about it. Our clients are making kick ass strides in the space. As I said last night (in between telling the crowd to “STFU”) I highlighted the importance of claiming your brand on Facebook. Facebook Fan Pages are becoming the go to sites for brands to send their consumers too. It’s not the main websites anymore, it’s Facebook.

Other topics I discussed:

• Get a vanity URL. Contact Facebook and ask them for it. We did it. Check it out: http://www.facebook.com/CarrotCreative
• Keep the fan page exciting-content is key here. You need to have a calendar of updates ready to be pushed out to your fans. They expect that. Whether or not you’re syncing up Twitter or a blog feed, uploading new videos every week, the content needs to be timely and updated.
• Analytics. Facebook has one of the most unique analytic reporting systems around. Use them to monitor the growth. You’ll be surprised at all you can find out from these stats and how important they are to the client. Knowing that there was a spike in traffic based on a campaign provides ROI reasoning and important lessons to be learned for the next round of outreach.
• Watch how your fans are interacting. Our good friends at The Onion sent over some really cool stats for the presentation about the interaction on their page. Did you know that there are over 260,000 fans, approximately 5,000 interactions per day and a lot more liking than commenting than wall posting? Bonus Cool fact: People love to tag The Onion photos with themselves or made up people/information.

Thanks again to Andrew Cherwenka from Trapeze for getting us on the panel and to Facebook for the support of the Garage. This event is something we look forward to every year where we can hear the exciting stuff being worked on by some of the smartest folks in the industry. (Side note: AppSavvy was a bit self promoting for this crowd. This event is the time to learn, not promote as mentioned in the initial outline of the event. This is not the place to hype up what you’re doing and I think the crowd picked up on it.)

If we didn’t get a chance to meet, become a fan of Carrot Creative on Facebook and let’s hang out there. Or, send me a shout on Twitter.