7 Easy Steps To Set Up A Facebook Page For Your Business

As promised in my last post on why a Facebook page can help your business succeed, today’s post looks at the practicalities of setting up a page. In short, it’s not difficult (yay!), but Facebook’s interface strikes me as a bit clunky when it comes to setting up and editing pages, and so there are a few “funnies” to watch out for.

Step 1: Find the Facebook link to create a page

Yup, this is one of those funnies I mentioned! Given that you have to have a Facebook account to create a page for your business, I would think that a logical place to put a link to create a page for your business would be on your Facebook profile itself. Unfortunately, Facebook’s logic and mine appear to differ in this regard!

Instead, you have the following options when it comes to finding the place on Facebook where you can create a page:

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
2. Go to http://www.facebook.com. Underneath the sign-up area, click on the link that says “create a page for a celebrity, band or business”.

   

3. Go to Facebook’s Advertising section by scrolling to the very bottom of your profile, and either clicking on “Advertising” or the “Ads and Pages” button. Once at the Advertising section, click on the link at the top to create a page.

   

4. While visiting an already existing page, look for the “create a page for my business” link towards the bottom of the left sidebar.

   

Step 2: Name your Facebook page and select a category

Warning! Warning! This step requires some careful thought, as this is the only information that cannot be changed at a later stage. The only way to change anything you select here is to delete your page and start from scratch – a minor annoyance if you make a mistake in the initial set-up before you have fans, but a big deal if you decide you want something different a few months down the line when your page is well and truly established.

For a small business, click on “Brand, product or organization” and choose the most appropriate category form the drop-down menu.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked to enter the name of your page. Here, many people make the mistake of entering a description of their business rather than the actual business name. While a description does tell people what you do, this dilutes your branding. It also prevents you from changing your initial Facebook messy page url to a much more clean vanity one as soon as your page has more than 100 fans.

When you’re done entering the information, type your name into the “digital signature” box and tick the box that asks you to confirm that you have the right to create a page for the business concerned. Then, click on the “Create page” button, and… voila! You have a Facebook page!

Step 3: Add information to your page

At this stage, you have a Facebook page, but it hasn’t yet been published to the outside world yet. Before you can do this, you need to add information about your business to the page.

There are three important things to do here:

1. Add a picture: If you have a business logo, use this as the picture on your page. You may also choose to use a picture of yourself here, if you are strongly identified with the business brand.
2. Edit the information that will be displayed on the “Info” tab: Click on the link at the top right of the tab to add the information required. This information can be added to or changed at a later stage.
3. Add some information to the “About” box: This box is found underneath the picture, and provides a quick snapshot of your business. You can use this box for your tagline, or to provide a quick summary of your business, or to highlight important keywords related to the products or services you offer.

Step 4: Choose a landing tab for your page

Facebook gives you the option to choose which tab new visitors to your page will see. The default setting is the wall tab, but it can often be confusing for new visitors to find themselves in the middle of a conversation without some sort of introduction to your business first.

As a result, it’s recommended that you direct new visitors to another tab – initially, you may want to use the “Info” tab for this purpose so that new visitors receive an overview, but you can change this at a later stage to a fully customised tab using HTML and Facebook’s own mark-up language, FBML.

This level of customisation is more complex – if you have a good knowledge of basic HTML, you may want to design such a page yourself; alternatively, contact a designer (like us here at Phenomenoodle, for example!), who can put together a custom landing tab for you.

To change the landing tab for new visitors to the “Info” tab, click on “Edit page” under your page picture, and click on the pencil image to the right of the “Wall settings” section to edit your preferences here.

Step 5: Publish your page

Once you have your page set up as you’d like it, publish the page (link on the top right of the editing page – see the image above) to make it visible to others on Facebook and the search engines.

Step 6: Become a fan of your own business

The first fan of your business is a very important person: you! Click on the link at the top of the page to add yourself as a fan. This action will appear in your personal profile news feed and be visible to your friends – an excellent way to alert people to the existence of your page.

Step 7: Invite friends to become fans of your page

Once you’ve published your page, another option is added to the menu below the picture: “suggest to friends”. Clicking on this option allows you to select which Facebook friends you’d like to send an invitation to to join your page. You can also use the “share” button at the bottom of the page to send a message to specific friends or to publish a message about your new page to your personal profile.

And there you have it – the basics of creating a Facebook page for your business!

Please use the comment section below to ask any questions you may have (or contact me by email). And once you’ve set up your page, please share it in the comments below – I’d love to see what you’re up to and become a fan of your business!

Lastly, please visit our Facebook page – it’s newly set up and will be receiving more customisation over the coming few weeks to make it look a bit prettier, but if you’d like to get in at the beginning to be able to say you knew us when, become a fan of Phenomenoodle on Facebook today!