This detailed guide will help you create your own Facebook business page in a matter of minutes. It’ll help you get on the path to making sure you can do Facebook Advertising and grow your business.
The 5-Step Guide to Creating Your Facebook Business Page:
- Identify your business.
- Add a profile picture and a cover photo.
- Introduce your page to the Facebook community.
- Publish content.
- Monitor results.
Before you started reading this, you might have taken a couple moments thinking about how in the world you could grow your business in no time. It’s hard not to notice how other businesses have been developing their brand and doubling their sales without much effort and resources to exhaust.
It’s plain and simple, really. Facebook happened, and the rest is history.
So much data has been found about how Facebook took a world domination with over billions of people migrating into this newfound platform. Well, it’s been around for quite some time, actually. You probably heard it in the news, read it in the (e)newspaper or simply noticed it in your own online observation that everything and everyone has become interconnected on Facebook one way or another.
And what do these facts have to do with your business?
It simply means that through Facebook, the marketplace has been elevated and that a grander scale of your target audience is already within reach.
Basically, the key takeaway here is that sooner than later, you’re gonna have to build up your business online if you have hopes for it to achieve an exponential growth. To do that, you’ll need to establish a good online presence by way of setting up and handling your own Facebook business page.
Although Facebook runs you through the process with the proper instructions as you go, it could get confusing when you stumble across terms and steps you’re not all too familiar with. And you wouldn’t want to be putting the wrong, inaccurate information about your business without you noticing it, would you? Cliche it may sound, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
So here’s a step-by-step guide on how to set up your Facebook business page without having to tip-toe your way around it looking for clues and hints. Trust me, it’s as easy as it gets.
To start creating your page, head over to this link: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create
1. Identify the type of your business.
The first step is to choose among the six pre-determined classifications in which your business page falls into:
- Local Business or Place
- Company, Organization or Institution
- Brand or Product
- Artist, Band or Public Figure
- Entertainment
- Cause or Community
For this, you have to be careful in choosing the right option because each classification has a unique page format. If you’re putting up a Facebook page for your local business, say, a storefront, cafe, boutique or a restaurant, you’ll need to fill out the fields indicating the name and type of your business, its address, and contact number.
But if you’re setting up a page that fits one of the five remaining classifications above, you’ll simply get asked to pick a category in which the nature of your business or cause belongs to. And from that, you’ll start building up your page in full detail.
2. Add a profile picture and a cover photo
Setting up a profile picture for your page is optional, just as it is when you’re signing up for a personal Facebook account. But know this; one of the key indicators of your brand or business identity is your profile picture and cover photo.
Aside from the name, the profile picture is an essential building block of your business page because it always gets shown alongside the name every time a user looks for or visits your page through a search bar. It also serves as an icon that confirms your identity every time your page pops out on the news feed in a public post.
That said, don’t think twice to add a profile picture to your page. Besides, it only takes a minute or two to get it done!
Since you’re probably thinking about setting your business logo or brand photo as your profile picture, you want to make sure that the photo you’ll be uploading perfectly fits Facebook’s standard profile picture size. Facebook uses a square format with an aspect ratio of 360 x 360 pixels so don’t forget to resize or re-layout your photo according to that ratio.
Consider this quite important detail too: Facebook displays two layouts of your profile picture on selected previews – a square and a circle. In the past, profile pictures have always appeared in the square format, but Facebook changed it up by displaying a circle format in some previews. That said, make sure that your picture contains no letters, words, or other details placed along the corners, top and bottom edges of the photo so that your profile picture won’t look like it was cut or incomplete.
After setting your profile picture, adding a cover photo to your page is also just as important.
With the same appearance and placement as the one in your personal Facebook profile, the cover photo is the main header of your business page that displays an enlarged image, taking up a quarter of your computer or phone’s screen. The standard size of a Facebook cover photo is 828 px wide by 315 px tall on desktop, and 640 px wide by 360 px tall on mobile, so make sure to have modify your photo in a way that matches that format.
An eye for detail sees through everything, they say.
3. Let your page be known!
Now that you’ve gone through the primer of the process, your Facebook business page is up and running.
The fundamental steps to the customization of your page is done, so it’s time for you to actually introduce your presence in the platform. You can start by inviting your friends to like your page. Since you are now the administrator of the page, Facebook derives your friends list from your personal account and allows you to send them invitations to like and follow your page.
Just a note, though, that not all invitations are guaranteed likes and follows. Taking the format of a personal Facebook account, friends you’ve sent an invitation to like your page can accept or decline the invitation, just as a Facebook user is given an option to confirm a friend request. Once a friend accepts that invitation, your page posts will be automatically included in their news feeds and they’ll be able to view your content without having to scroll through your main page on the regular.
However, before you start hitting the Invite button on your friends list, it is highly recommended that you first publish a post or two. It can be a teaser, a short greeting or a welcoming statement that will appear on your main page. Most probably, a friend you’ve invited will check your page out before accepting the invitation, so it helps that your page has a bit of content to not make your page look like it’s empty.
4. Get active by posting content.
Aside from invitations, publishing content on your page is how you could grow your audience. Posting relevant, entertaining and informative posts can attract users outside of your friends list to like, follow, and interact with your business page. The main source of activity that transpires on your page is the content that populates it.
Facebook lets you choose from different types of content format according to your liking or the intent of your post. It can be a status, a photo or video, a live video or a product or event.
- Status – A status is a text post or statement that can be supplemented by a photo or video within the post, an icon that says what you’re currently doing or feeling, your location or a product or service involved in that status. This is typically used for announcements, promotions, greetings, etc.
- Photo/Video – This option lets you share an image or video clip with a caption that describes the post. There is no standard size when you post a photo and no duration limit when you post a video. There are various types of format that come with photo and video posting; it can be in the form of a single photo/video, a Photo Album, a Carousel, a Slideshow, or a Canvas. This article will walk you through these different formats and their uses.
- Live Video – When you post a live video, you’re basically documenting and sharing whatever is happening at the exact moment you are in. It’s as if you’re doing a live report on TV, except it’s on Facebook. Anyone who can see your post can view the live video and interact with it by dropping comments and reactions as you speak. Doing a live video on events and significant affairs is particularly appealing to your audience because they’re getting an instant coverage of what’s happening in the now.
- Product or Event – If you’re trying to promote a product or event, there are also preexisting formats that you can choose from depending on the type of your item or cause.
Whichever format you choose to get your content across the platform, it’s also important to be guided by Facebook’s terms and policies. Since everything you’ll be posting on your page is for public viewing, you want to make sure that your content does not violate any of Facebook’s rules and regulations.
5. Monitor your page activity.
Measuring how people have been interacting with your page is key to understanding your business’s online performance. Once you start setting goals and objectives for your business in terms of its Facebook progress, monitoring your page activity should be done regularly. The data that Facebook gathers can influence the way you approach your audience in your succeeding posts.
You can look into these data by going to the Insights section of your page where a detailed summary of your page activity is presented. Here are some terms you might want to keep in mind to understand data easier:
- Page Views – This section of your Facebook page determines how many times your page has been visited and browsed by a user.
- Reach – Your reach count tells you how many people, including those who haven’t liked or followed your page, actually saw your post/s.
- Impression – This activity tells you how many times your post has been flashed in someone else’s news feed. If a user saw it once then saw it again in another instance, that is counted as a new impression.
- Engagement – When a user likes, reacts, or comments on your post, that is considered an engagement.
Now, before you start populating your page, you might want to pick up where you left off. To fully customize your page, quickly add your finishing touches or clear the grey areas so you won’t miss out on important details. At the top section of your page, Facebook displays a list of the things on your page that need information/optimization. It won’t hurt to have these fields filled out because they add to your page’s completeness and, in a way, credibility.
And that’s it! Your Facebook business page is all set. You can now start growing your audience and developing your brand on the most-used online platform on the planet!
There are, however, other sections and features on your Facebook page which you can use to maximize the platform. It’s a huge advantage when you’re well-equipped with the way your business page works in all aspects. In the next article, you’ll get to dig deeper into your business page by learning how its other tools and instruments work.