by constructaquote - 10 March 2017
Facebook is a powerful tool. More than 1.6 billion people use the social network around the world each month, with over 31 million registered in the United Kingdom alone.
Those figures highlight the potential for small business owners as Facebook offers a number of exciting options for companies to get their name and products in front of the eyes of potential customers. One of those options is Pages, which act as a dedicated hub for your business or service.
Here, we provide a full guide to the basics of building and managing a professional Facebook Page.
Setup
To start working on your page, go to the top, right hand side of Facebook’s navigation bar; click the downward arrow, and select ‘Create Page’.
For an even easier method, just click on this link or copy and paste the following into your URL bar: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/
From there, select the type of page you are looking to build; this can range from local business, organisation, or specific product. For this guide, we will be choosing ‘Local business or place’.
Upon selecting ‘Local business or place’, you will be asked to fill in the following, after which Facebook will generate a basic page:
Facebook will give you a standard template, but this can be changed to suit your business or service through Settings > Edit Page > Templates.
The Services template may be particularly practical for tradespeople as it offers a range of useful options for a call to action button to help encourage potential customers to use:
Now it’s time to fill your page with some content. A profile picture (1) is vital, as it showcases your company logo to the world. To take full advantage of this, your profile picture must be 180 x 180 pixels or bigger.
Then there is your cover image (2), which, despite being a vanity feature, is an opportunity to focus on a product or service you are selling or providing. This must be 820 × 315 pixels or bigger, keeping to the same ratio.
On the right hand side of the page will be a short About section. There are two parts to this; one being a description of your business; and a second already containing the information (map, phone number, website, etc.) you entered earlier on. The description above needs to be kept short and sweet, but informative at the same time – think of the words that your customers may use to search for your type of business or services, as this will help them find you.
About: In addition to that short section, there is an extensive About sub-page. Here you can highlight the story of your business, milestones, awards, additional contact details, and information for visiting customers such as parking details.
Services: Facebook pages offer an opportunity for an in-depth insight into your professional services. Each separate service can be highlighted through its own section containing a title, description, and relevant picture.
Now that you have plenty of content and information available to your customers, you need to take some time to get a better idea of your settings options. These are incredibly important, as they hide some nice features.
You can enable reviews to give your customers the chance to offer praise and feedback, define administrators if you have other staff you trust to manage the page, set up messaging settings, and determine exactly what notifications you want.
Invite: You cannot force other Facebook users to ‘Like’ and follow your page, but you can start by sending out some invites to your personal friends and family, and even add a page link to your email signature.
Promote: A Facebook page is entirely free, but you can promote your Facebook page and boost posts to reach a larger audience through a customisable budget determined by you. This can be tailored for your targeted audience by age, location, and even interests – perfect for small businesses starting off on the world’s largest social hub!
So there you have it – the most basics of setting up a page for your business to start getting noticed on Facebook. From here, it’s vital to be patient with the growth of your page as hundreds of ‘Likes’ will not appear overnight. Simply keep it updated regularly with relevant content, communicate with customers in a professional manner, and trust that popularity will increase with time.
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