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Getting Started With Facebook Pages for Your Business

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Donncha Hughes

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Donncha Hughes is a mentor, trainer and business advisor. I deliver group and one to one training on Wordpress. My background is assisting business with development of marketing, business plans, grant and finance applications. See www.startuphughes.com for more...

How to create a Business Page on Facebook

This post will briefly detail the steps involved in Creating a Facebook Business Page. It is not uncommon for people who are setting up a business to incorrectly set up their business on Facebook as a person when they should be setting it up as a Business.This post will firstly outline the advantages of setting up as a business page and then show how it is done. Finally, there is a link to a video explaining what to do if you have set up your business as a person and now want to update it so that it is a proper business page … this is called Migrating your Page.

 

Starting Point

Within Facebook (logged in) if you surf to any Facebook Business Page such as my one, you will see a button titled create Business page. You click on this and follow the instructions.

Facebook Page versus Facebook Profile

Getting Started With Facebook Pages for Your Business. When it comes to creating a presence for your business on Facebook, very often business choose a Facebook Profile instead of a Facebook Page. It is very important that you start off on the right foot, so I have reasons for choosing a Facebook page over a Facebook profile and then I will bring you through the steps needed to create a presence for your business.

Facebook Profiles

  • Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual.
  • Profiles are limited to 5,000 “friends“.
  • Setting up a business using a profile page is against Facebook Terms of Service.
  • Profiles require you to manually accept new friend requests, which can get time consuming.

Facebook Pages

  • Facebook pages are meant to represent group, an organisation or a business.
  • Pages are not limited to 5,000.
  • Pages automatically accept “Like” requests.
  • Pages are indexed by search engines like Google and Bing, this increases the visibility of your business.
  • You get Facebook Insights with a Page – which is a free (and very useful) analytics tool for your Page.
  • You can schedule posts for Facebook Business Pages
  • A business can authorise several Administrators to its Business Page
  • Any interaction with a page is shared with friends of those who interacted with it…. this is changing

Facebook Profiles are designed to represent people while Facebook Pages are designed for Businesses, Brands and organisations. To be honest, as a business you don’t want to ‘act’ as a person on Facebook … seeing all the personal photos etc of people that you don’t know. I firmly believe that Facebook business and personal should be kept separate on Facebook.

One Facebook Account

Facebook account dropdownTo avoid any confusion, I am going to state what may not be obvious if you are new to Facebook pages. Each person has one Facebook account with which they can then access either their Personal Profile or one of many Facebook Pages – you can administer lots of Facebook pages. After logging into Facebook click on the dropdown link, as displayed above, to access your Facebook Business Page.

How to set-up a Facebook Page

Step 1

First you need to go to this link:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Step 2

Pick one of the  following 6 categories:

  1. Local business or place
  2. Company organisation or institution
  3. Brand or product
  4. Artist, band or public figure
  5. Entertainment
  6. Cause or community

 

 

Step 3

Once you select one of the above you will then be asked to fill in the details of your business. Fill in as much as possible, your customers will be able to see this information and it will have an impact on how you will be found within Facebook searches.

Step 4

Upload an image. This is the image that will appear on the left hand side of your Facebook page and it will appear beside and comments or posts from your page on the Facebook Wall.

Step 5

Click on import contacts,  you will be able to import contact emails and send to them to let them know you are on Facebook.

Step 6, 7 & 8

Enter some more details, Post a status update on your Wall and then Promote this page with a Like Box. The Like box will enable you to add a box to your website to drive fans towards your Facebook page.

Step 9

Create a Vanity url, this converts a url such as http://www.facebook.com/128807800473689 to a more friendly name such as http://www.facebook.com/startuphughes. You can then include this more friendly link on any print media . To get your Vanity Url go to www.facebook.com/username

Migrating your Page

Finally, a business may have set up a Facebook page as a Profile and not as a person. There is a superb blogpost written by Amanda Webb of Spiderworking.com with a short (3 minute) video on how to migrate your Facebook Profile to a Business Page. This is the link within Facebook which is referred to in the video.

www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate

And here is Amanda’s post on merging Facebook pages in case you have created a few Facbook pages and now want to merge them.

Happy Facebooking!

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