These days, creating a Facebook page for your business is no longer a luxury.
Many small, medium and large businesses are using Facebook as a successful vehicle for promoting their brands and engaging with existing and potential customers – and when set up and maintained correctly, you can reach far more users than you’ve been getting to previously.
A Facebook Page is free to set up, can be configured in less than five minutes (for a basic page), and doesn’t require any previous web development experience – although adding some of the more advanced interactive features are a little trickier.
Get started
Visit www.facebook.com/business/pages and click the ‘Create a Page’ button.
You’ll need to specify the category your page will fall under (options include: local business or place; company, organisation or institution; and brand or product) as well as the name of the page.
The advantages of connecting to your existing personal profile
If you don’t have a Facebook account already, you’ll need to create one to establish the page.
If you already have a personal Facebook account you can use this profile or create a new one just for the business page. The advantage of using your personal profile is that you can tap into your friends list to encourage contacts to become fans of the page by ‘liking’ it.
You can also promote your page by using the ‘Import contacts’ button to send automated emails to people in your Outlook and email contacts lists, and sharing it to the wall of your personal profile.
Customising your URL
Once you reach 25 fans Facebook, you’ll also be able to create a custom URL for your Facebook page (IE facebook.com/smartermag) making it a lot easier to post the page’s link to your email signature, business cards, website and advertisements.
Update your details
The final step is adding some basic information about your business.
You can link to your business’ website, and fill in a basic ‘About’ paragraph.
Click the ‘Edit info’ link to add detailed information on your business.
From that same window, you can also click on the ‘Manage permissions’ link to regulate who can see your page and whether users can add content to the page.
Just like a personal Facebook page, you can post status updates, photos, links, videos to the wall, and you can add applications from the Facebook directory for things like custom HTML content, polls, contests and RSS feeds.
And that’s it – your Facebook Page is complete.
You’ll now need to start populating it with content and adding to it regularly to keep fans interested!