Setting up your Facebook Business Page

If you already have a Facebook page, I suggest you follow through this guide, I am sure there will be features you did not know about. Facebook has developed some of the interaction since the last time I wrote a guide, a year ago.

Whether or not you personally use Facebook, many people do. It is therefore sensible that you have a business page on Facebook. It is a temptation for many to use their personal Facebook page to advertise their business at the start. This is understandable as they already have a following of friends who they can recruit to help promote their business, but this strategy fails very quickly when you open up to new people.
If you use a personal page to promote your business then you will find yourself becoming friends with your customers and then confusing these with your real friends. You will not be able to use many of Facebook’s own business promotion tools with your personal page.

If you are serious about promoting your business on Facebook, then you must crate business Facebook page. You will find access to this on your Facebook page by clicking on the triangle in the top right-hand corner of the menu bar where you see the option to create a page and manage a page.

You are now presented with six options for your page. All business pages work the same but some have extra fields. If you are a physical business location then you should pick local business or place. If you are a large company you may wish to pick company organisation or institution. If you just wish to promote a brand or a website then brand or product is most suitable. If you’re looking to promote yourself and understand the pitfalls of using your own personal Facebook page then Artis banned a public figure is the option to you. The entertainment category is just that. If you create a cause or community page then be aware that Facebook has the option to take this back under their control and remove your admin rights. This is the only category they tend to be involved with. Please make sure that you have read and agree with Facebook page terms before you start

Once you have chosen your page, it is time to start populating it with content. You firstly need a cover page and a profile picture. Remember that your profile picture is the image that will be shown whenever a post is seen on Facebook from you the business. Remember that you can post as the business and not as yourself.
Facebook business pages can have multiple admin is in charge of it unlike your personal page. You can therefore add additional admin’s to control your page and all of you can post as yourselves or as the page. This, and many other controls can be found under the settings menu item.

General

Favourites – This allows you to add the page to your own Favourites.
Page visibility – You can have your page published, so it is seen, or unpublished so only the admins can see and edit it. If you are wanting privacy while you create the page, then unpublish.
Visitor posts – Whether you allow visitors to post to your page. If you do then make sure you monitor what is written. On by default.
Reviews – Allow visitors to add reviews. Off by default
News Feed audience and visibility for posts – When you post you can choose who sees the post in their news feed using gender, age and other things facebook knows about everyone. This limits posts to your target group. Off by default, everyone sees.
Messages – Allows private messages to the page.
Tagging ability – Allows others to tag videos and photos the page publishes. useful for some businesses to promote social sharing. Or you can allow just those that are managing the page to tag.
Country restrictions – You can restrict countries where the page is seen.
Age restrictions – You can restrict younger people from seeing your page, but as so many underage users lied about their age to get onto Facebook, this option is never effective.
Page moderation – You can add keywords and comments or posts containing those words will be blocked. Some have used this to stop competition products or names filling their page.
Profanity filter – You can restrict the level of profanity, Facebook can overrule with their own rules too.
Similar Page suggestions – Allows Facebook to recommend your page to others with similar interests.
Post in Multiple Languages – Allows your page managers to post in multiple languages.
Comment ranking – comments with the most likes and replies will be shown top, otherwise it will just be the latest comments
Content distribution – allow download of video content, or stop it.
Download Page – allows you to obtain a copy of your page into.
Merge pages – allows the merging of multiple pages. Must by the same thing and at the same address. This is a request and can be declined. Likes are merged most content is not.
Delete Page – If you no longer use a page, then it can be deleted rather than leaving an unused page gathering dust…

Messaging

The response assistant is a neat way to have an automated reply to messages. Please then remember to follow them up yourself within whatever promises you make.

Post Attribution

You can post as yourself, or the page. This can be changed when you do a post, but I suggest you keep the post as business page as your default.

Notifications

You obviously want to stay on top of things, but not be flooded out. i suggest you turn on most of these features when you start and gradually turn off those that annoy when your page is more busy. if you are going to collect emails on actions, you may want to setup outlook rules to put the messages in a separate folder.

Page roles

This is where you add admins to look after your page with you. You can type their name n if they are a friend of yours. Otherwise you can use the email address they joined facebook with.  Note that there are a number of roles you can set which will limit the access rights and usage for each position.

People and other Pages

This shows the people and other pages that like your business page.

Facebook provide a good tale to explain. The table below outlines the 5 Page roles (across) and what they’re able to do (down):

Set Preferred Page Audience

Once you understand your target audience, you can define them here to help Facebook put you in front of the correct people.

Connect an Instagram account for advertising

If you have an Instagram business account, and I suggest you consider it, then you can link Facebook to it here for ads.

Featured

Your can like pages for your business page and even feature page owners you wish to promote.

Page Support

Is where you can check on issues raised with the help centre.

Activity Log

Allows you to track back what has been happening on the page.