How to Set Up a Facebook Page for Your Business
How to Set Up a Facebook Page for Your Business
For a lot of local businesses, Facebook is a must-have resource to promote your goods and services to your community. Facebook business pages are easy to set up, free, and stationed on the most popular social media platform in the history of the world. While using Facebook shouldn’t be an automatic for every organization, local businesses should strongly consider setting up a Facebook page as their hub of community interaction. It’s a great place for your customers to congregate and to share their love of your products and services with their networks. Additionally, Facebook is a convenient platform to post business updates, like changes in hours, to a large audience.
Setting up a Facebook business page is extremely easy as Facebook walks you through the set-up process step-by-step. If you’re still not totally confident that the Big Blue F company has your best interest in mind when initially setting up your business page, we’re here to walk you through the process as well.
1. Create a Page
First, from the home page of your personal Facebook account, click the + sign in the top right corner of the screen, then select Page.
2. Enter Basic Page Details
Add your page name, category, and description. The category basically gives your community a quick look into what type of business you are. Then click Create Page.
3. Add a Profile Picture and Cover Photo
Once you hit Create Page, in the same left sidebar, you’ll now be able to add a profile picture and cover photo. For most businesses, you’ll want to use your logo. The image should be high quality. We find a 500×500 pixel image works best. Give your logo a little breathing room around the edges so that Facebook doesn’t crop it out when it displays your profile picture.
Selecting a cover photo is a little bit trickier than the profile picture. You want a photo that is welcoming, attention-grabbing, and that shows your brand voice. As far as the size goes, this one is again a little bit more complicated. Cover photos display as different sizes on desktop and mobile, and they’re not even the same size ratio. So here’s what you need: a photo with a ratio of 820 pixels wide by 360 pixels tall. Then you need to keep a safe zone around the photo of 24 pixels on the top and bottom margins and 90 pixels on the left and right margins. This will create a safe zone that will display properly on both desktop and mobile Facebook. To insure important elements of your cover photo are within the safe area, download our convenient template which you can use in your design app, like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer.
4. Celebrate (a little)
Congrats! Your Facebook business page is officially live! However, you’re not done quite yet.
5. Edit Page Info
On the left sidebar of your admin view, select Edit Page Info.
6. Fill in Your Detailed Page Information
Here’s where you’ll get to fill in more details about your business, including a username, description, categories, website, email, service area, hours, price range, and link to your privacy policy. Unlike your page name, your username has to be unique. This means if your business is called Joe’s Car Rental, you can name your page that, but you probably won’t be able to nab that username anymore, so you might have to choose something like joes-car-loudoun. A description is a brief summary up to 255 characters that gives your page visitors a quick overview of your business. Here you’ll be able to additional categories for your business. Fill in your phone number and location. Your website should be pretty self-explanatory, but if you don’t have one, just tick the “My Page doesn’t have a website” box. We do recommend adding an email address as another way your customers can contact you. Service area allows you to choose up to ten neighborhoods, cities, or regions where you deliver, ship, or provide services. If you have regular hours, it’s a good idea to fill those in here, and you can customize the hours for each day of the week. You do not need to fill in the impressum, unless you live in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, or another country required by law to include a statement of ownership on your web presence. If you have a privacy policy on your website, there is a place to add the link to the your Facebook page as well.
7. Check Updated About Section
Once you save all your changes, head back to your page and in the left sidebar of the main body of your page, you should see your newly updated about section with the details you just filled in.
8. Add a Button
Next, you’ll want to navigate back to your main page and select + Add a Button.
9. Edit Page Button
In the pop up, you’ll be able to select from a number of actions you can have your pages visitors take when they click your button. There are more than ten options, so take the time to read through them and select the one that makes most sense for your business.
10. Updated Button
Once you save your options, you’ll be brought back to your page where you should see your newly updated button.
11. Edit Page Settings
Navigate to the admin left sidebar and select Page Settings.
12. Check Out Your General Page Settings
In the general page settings area, you have the ability to limit who can post on your page, who can tag photos on your page, who can see your page, and a bunch of other settings. Unfortunately, without knowing your business, there is no way to make recommendations for how to set each of the settings, however, if you don’t want to deal with these, using the default settings is a pretty solid choice.
13. Templates and Tabs
From the same page settings area, click on Templates and Tabs in the left admin sidebar. Based on the category you selected in the basic details section when you first created your page, Facebook will have selected a template for you. However, if you disagree with Facebook’s assessment, you can edit that template to any of the following Templates: Services, Business, Venues, Nonprofit, Politicians, Restaurants & Cafes, Shopping, Video Page, and Standard. For the most part, the different templates just re-order and toggle on and off different page Tabs (or sections). You can always mainly rearrange your page sections by dragging and dropping the sections in the Tabs area. You can also toggle certain sections on and off if you don’t want to include them on your page.
14. Page Roles
From the same page settings area, click on Page Roles in the left admin sidebar. From here you can add different users to help manage your page, by Assigning a New Page Role. To add a new user, simply type their name or email, select the specific role you want to give them, then click add. There are five page roles available.
Admin
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- Can manage all aspects of the Page. They can publish and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, post from Instagram to Facebook, create ads, see who created a post or comment, view insights, and assign Page roles. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct messages, sync business contact info and create ads.
Editor
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- Can publish content and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, post from Instagram to Facebook, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct messages, sync business contact info and create ads.
Moderator
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- Can send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to Instagram comments, send Direct messages and create ads.
Advertiser
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- Can create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can create ads.
Analyst
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- Can see which admin created a post or comment and view insights.
15. Connect Your Instagram
From the same page settings area, click on Instagram in the left admin sidebar. If you didn’t know, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion. So the integration between Facebook and Instagram is pretty seamless and can be beneficial for your business. To connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page, click Connect Account, then follow the prompts by logging into your Instagram account and accepting all the default options.
16. Invite Friends to Like Your Page
Growing your community is vital to the success of your local business, and your friends are usually great advocates to help you spread the word. From your main business page, navigate to the Invite Friends to Like Your Page section and click Invite Friends.
17. Select Which Friends to Invite
In the pop up, you’ll be able to select which friends you want to invite by Clicking the Bubble next to their name. Alternatively, you can Select All, and invite all your Facebook friends to like your page. Once you’ve selected which friends to invite, click Send Invites.
18. Have a Dance Party!
Congratulations! You made it. Your page is now ready to start sharing important updates about your business. There is a delicate balance between getting your word out and bombarding your new page followers which takes some time to get right, but there’s no better way to figure that out than by experimenting with your own content to your own community on your own page.
Best of luck! If you need any help with any of the steps, please let us know.
Note: We did not build the ResQ BBQ Facebook page, and we’re using it strictly as an example.