Become a fan of Successful Pages
Find them here.
While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, take a look at how they work, and if you find something you like that may work with your project, adapt it.
Here's some Criteria
Interaction - Does the page encourage interaction? What content works best? What doesn't?
Soft-Selling - What influences exist within the content that suggest or persuade?
Creativity - What makes the page more interesting in the rigid environment of Facebook?
Informing - How and what information is used to educate and inform?
Start with the Profile Pic
The death of FBML and Static FBML was the beginning of new end runs to creates unique landing pages, but before you dole out $19.95 a month, see what you can do to get the most out of the most prominent feature on the page, your page's profile pic.
Facebook doesn't go out of their way to tell anyone this, but they'll allow profile pic sizes right up to 180x540 pixels. Yes, really.
This image from GCC's latest expedition depicts that aspect ratio.
There's some debate to the efficacy of exploiting all of FB's allotted pixels.
Social Media Examiner suggests that since the tab navigation position is affected by the position of the profile pic, you should balance the height of the pic to keep your page navigation above the frame.
Likewise, your page's profile pic and the accompanying photostrip should work together graphically. Designers could get very creative here.
This screen shot of Manchester Library's page is a great example of working the profile pic and the photostrip together:
Obviously, the profile pic image for GCC didn't start out that way. It began as a 2592x1936 image, or a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The image itself was composed vertically, lending itself to the narrow aspect ratio of the profile pic. I imported the image into iPhoto, used the cropping tool where in Custom mode I entered the values of 180x540.
There are other ways, applications and software, where you can end up with the same results.
Once saved, I exported the image to Facebook and made it GGC's profile pic, being careful as well to edit the thumbnail so I'd end up with an identity other than the monolith or the water.
The Photostrip
This addition to Pages seemed to open up some additional possibilities as illustrated with the Manchester Library above. The problem, though, and disappointing to many designers, is that the photostrip does not load in the same order every time the page is displayed.
For example, I took an image and divided it into five separate images in an effort to make a mosaic, but ehen I uploaded the images in order into a FB album, the images displayed in the photostrip at random versus the order I created.
Shoot.
So, instead I grabbed an image with a strong horizon and manipulated the chroma on a five point scale and uploaded the images. I'm not really happy with it, but it illustrates the point. I'm going to shoot images specific to this and upload them to take advantage of this feature.