Are you thinking you really need to figure out this Facebook thing and get your business on there? Or have you dabbled in Facebook marketing a bit, have a double-digit of fans (most of them your friends from college) but still don’t quite know what to do?
If you’re still not sure about the dimensions of the cover photo (Cover photo? What cover photo?) or if the idea of setting up an app makes you sweat more than the recurring nightmares of forgetting your locker combination, then you’re in the right place.
This is the help-I-don’t-know-where-to-start guide to getting your social car out of park. Then you can get the super scoop about using Timeline for business and pick up a few pointers for engaging your audience.
But for now, let’s talk getting started. So what do you do first?
Get Your Page
If you’re brand new to Facebook for business, the first place to start is with a business page. You don’t actually create an account for your business page. Rather, you create a page through your personal account. So you must be logged into your own personal Facebook account before you can build a page.
To begin building a page, start here and choose a category.
Holy mackerel, would you look at all those choices! One might expect a bit of exposition about each of these page types considering many businesses can fall into more than one of these categories.
Alas, there is a dearth of useful information from Facebook on what to select here. The important thing to know about these categories is that the primary difference is in the type of information you can enter about your organization.
Here is a short breakdown.
Local Business or Place: you can enter your store hours, parking availability, address and price range along with basic info like web address, phone number and “About” info. If you want to list your store’s details, this is a good choice.
Company, Organization or Institution: you can enter product information, awards, your mission, founded date, address, description and web, contact and About info. If you don’t have a storefront or you’re an online business, this is a good choice.
Brand or Product: you can enter similar information as the company page but no address. The assumption here is that your products are sold through multiple vendors or retailers, like Apple or Dell. If you’re one of these guys, or you’re mass-distributing a product, go for it. Otherwise stick to Company.
Artist, Band or Public Figure: in addition to similar info as mentioned above, you can also include your birthday, bio, political affiliation (for public figures), influences (for bands) and other specific details depending on the subcategory you pick. This is a good choice if you’re looking to promote yourself personally rather than as a business.
Entertainment: you can enter a website and description but no contact info. This is a good choice if you’re promoting a book, movie or something similar.
Cause or Community: you can enter a bunch of personal info here, such as your educational information, employer, interests and contact info including web address and cell phone. This is a good choice for no apparent reason I can think of. Oddly, Non-Profit is listed under Company/Organization, as is Religious Group and most baffling of all, “Cause”. I’d check the other categories first before attempting this type of page.
The good news is that if this is all rather much, you can (sort of) change your mind later. After you create the page, you can go to Edit Page > Update Info and change the category. The bad news is that the categories here don’t match the initial selections one-to-one. For example, Artist/Band/Public Figure is not on the list but “People” is, and you can select “Band” from the subcategories.
Your best bet is to think about this for a moment and select your best choice. But don’t get so hung up that you stop. It’s not impossible to change later, it may just take a bit of exploring. Worst case scenario? You can delete the page entirely (before you get it going) and just try again.
Claim Your Name
Your page URL is going to start its life looking something like this:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/MyCoolPage/968243039976812
That’s not sexy to say at a party. Ideally you want your URL to be your business, organization, book or band name. If you can’t get the exact name for length or other reasons, then aim for something printable, say-able and relevant to you.
Now, not to split hairs but there’s a difference between your actual page name and your page username. Your page name is what’s visible on your actual page itself, right under your Cover Photo on your Timeline. Your page username is what appears after facebook.com in the URL. That’s how your page appears in a browser address bar and how you print it on business cards and letterhead.
Clear as black ink, eh?
The important thing to know is that you can change your page name only up until you have 200 Likes. After that, you cannot change it, so make up your mind early!
When it comes to usernames (URLs) you can set it once and change it once. If you set a username and then change it, you cannot change it again.
Complete Your Info
Now that you’ve got all these empty information fields, start filling ’em in. Go to Edit Page > Update Info and that will take you to the Basic Information screen. Knock yourself out.
Memorize that edit button! It’s going to be your new best friend.
As you enter info, the important thing to know is that if you’re a brand, company or person, your “About” info is going to show up under your Cover Photo on your Timeline. If you’re a local biz, you’re going to see address, phone and hours.
Set Your Cover Photo And Profile Image
Your profile picture is the small-ish square the sits at the bottom left of the Cover Photo on your Timeline. It’s also the picture that appears beside your posts in other people’s newsfeeds. Since it ends up being a tiny icon in the newsfeed, you should consider this when you select a photo. Choose something with too many intricate details or that doesn’t compress well and it will be harder for people to recognize.
Generally a logo works well here for businesses.
You can set your profile picture in one of two ways.
Go to Edit Page > Update Info and select “Profile Picture” from the left side navigation. From here you can browse for a photo. There’s no Save function here so once you browse and select a photo, it’s a done deal.
You can also change your Profile photo from the Timeline itself. When you arrive there for the first time, a popup box will guide you to browse for a photo the same way. In the future, you can change your photo by going back to the edit page or simply by hovering over your photo until the “edit” button pops up.
A note about size: Although Facebook won’t tell you (unless you do it wrong), you cannot upload a photo less than 180 pixels wide. Given that the photo itself is sqare-ish, I suggest you upload a photo at 180 x 180 to reduce the likelihood that it will end up squished or cropped. If you upload a larger photo, Facebook will automatically downsize it but then you risk some nasty compression, so stick to 180 x 180 and you should be ok.
The Cover Photo gets added one way and that’s by clicking on the little “Add a Cover” icon on the Timeline itself.
There’s a boatload of restrictions about what you can’t put in the image so I’ll let you read those here.
The important thing to note here is that you should upload a photo that’s 851 pixels x 315 pixels. Talk about precise, right?
If you upload a smaller photo it will get stretched and look horrendous, so stick to those dimensions.
You might find that your photo looks horrendous anyway. What’s the deal with that?
Whatever fancy compression Facebook does on the back end can wreak havoc with some types of photos. Photos with large expanses of a single color fare the worst. Photos with some depth of color and texture do better.
Any time you want to change your cover photo, just hover over it on your timeline and you’ll get a “Change Cover” popup.
Once you’ve done this, you’re pretty much set as far as getting the basics in place!
Take A Gander Through Your Options
There are a few other settings to be aware of, all of which can be accessed by going to Edit Page > Update Info.
I’ll go through those briefly.
Your Settings: go here to check whether you want to be alerted when someone comments on, Likes or messages your page. Since we’re talking marketing here, I suggest you check one of these boxes!
Manage Permissions: these are fairly self-explanatory when you see them, but note that you can set whether or not people can post or add photos to your page, tag photos or message you. You can also add blacklisted words that should not be allowed on your Timeline. Finally, this is where you go to delete your page, but this is totally un-doable so be very sure you mean it!
Featured: lets you essentially Like another page as your page and show it on your Timeline. This may be a good option if you’re building reciprocal relationships with other businesses.
Resources: among other things, this is where you go if you want to set up an ad or get some marketing guidelines from Facebook.
Admin Roles: use this if you want to make someone else an admin on your page. There are various permission levels you can select to determine what that person can do. This lets you give someone else access to help you with your page without giving them access to your personal account.
Apps: lists the apps added to your page. Some are default apps, such as photos and events.
Mobile: this is where you can get your “upload email” so that you can send a photo and caption to your page directly via your phone. Given the number of “I was drunk and had no idea what button I pushed” mistakes that I’ve seen, you may want to stick to doing this while you’re at your desk.
Insights: all sorts of statistical goodness about interactions with your posts, demographics of your audience and reach. A post in itself! But good to check out early and often.
Help: exactly what it sounds like. More information than you’ll ever want to process.
Now, What About Those Apps?
In my experience there are three things that wake people up at night in a cold sweat: the prospect of losing their job, the threat of nuclear war and Facebook apps.
Can you get all fancy and complex with Facebook apps? Sure. You can spend lots of money on designing and programming custom apps. But you can also set up apps that are no more difficult than anything else we’ve just done, assuming you can dry your palms and stop them from slipping off the keyboard.
Just think of an app as another page, but instead of sitting there with posts and a status box, it does something else. What that thing is, is up to you.
On our Facebook page we have an app that lets people sign up for our email list. Some people use apps to display a special welcome video or tutorial. Maybe you want to pull your most recent blog posts into your app, or even set up a store right on Facebook.
Let’s start at the beginning and you’ll see how easy it can be.
For starters, your apps will appear in small rectangles – called tabs – below your cover photo. Up to 4 are visible at a time, but you can see more by clicking the small arrow to the far right of the last tab.
The Photo tab is always visible and it’s always the left-most tab. It shows the last photo you uploaded, so you may want to consider that as you begin to upload photos.
Visible tabs are called “Favorites” and once you have multiple apps, you can add any 3 additional apps to your favorites by clicking the + icon at the top of the app.
Since the default apps are certainly nothing to write home about, how do you add your own?
The simplest way is to start with a third-party service like Shortstack or Lujure. Although the exact how-tos of using one of these services is beyond the scope of this post, they’re pretty simple and straightforward. You can log in using your Facebook account and try them out for free. It’s pretty easy to drag-and-drop your way to a cool tab and if you’re just getting started, you can tinker around, mess up, delete it and try again without anyone being the wiser!
An important thing to note about tabs: most apps have some sort of default photo that will appear in your tab on your Timeline. But those are sort of ugly, certainly not branded to you and probably won’t invite people to click.
Once you’ve added an app, click on that little arrow to expand them again, and then when you hover over one you’ll get a little pencil icon that means you can edit it. Click the pencil and you’ll get more editing goodness.
A couple of things you can do:
Swap position with: this lets you rearrange the order of your tabs and will come in handy when you have more than 4 apps and you want to show some and hide others.
Remove from favorites: takes it off your tabs but does not delete the app.
Edit settings: the goldmine! This is where you go to change the default image and the name that appears under the tab. Use this wisely – make sure both the image and text invite people to click. The size of the image you upload for your tabs should be 111 pixels x 74 pixels. Yup, more exactness.
Link to this tab: if you want to send people directly to an app, perhaps a storefront, video or special message you can get a direct URL here.
How About That Blank Page, Eh?
Now that you’ve set up your Facebook page, all that empty space will be staring at you along with the one fan your page has – you.
So yes, it’s time to get out there and start marketing, winning fans and influencing people. That’s a whole other topic, but the good news is that you’re starting rock-solid and you don’t look like some befuddled newbie tinkering around on a computer and just hoping something clicks.
But before you get to the juicy heart of marketing, there’s one more thing you can do to pimp out your page a bit and look a little more legit than just a big empty space.
At the top of your status box, there is an option to add Events and Milestones. I suggest you throw a few Milestones in there. A milestone can be the date you made your first dollar, landed your first big gig or released your first book. The nice thing is that you can date it with the year, month and day it happened, so it begins to fill out the story of your organization. Add a little exposition and don’t overlook the photo. Remember, this is a visual medium and people like the pretty, shiny things.
No need to go overboard but if you can create a bit of backstory for your organization with milestones, dates and photos, it will be a much more compelling experience when you finally do invite people to Like your page.
One last tip: milestone photos display full-width at 843 x 403 so if you size your photos properly you’ll take advantage of the full space without any funky cropping or compression.
Two Quick Things To Know
Thing 1: I mention this because I’ve seen it happen a lot. You want a page, you create one. You mess around with it a bit. Maybe you create another page and mess around with that one. You’re not really sure what you’re doing but you’re adding Likes and posting some stuff… in multiple places. Quite possibly you’re also accumulating friends on your personal page and doing a bit of marketing there.
But here’s the problem: you cannot “transfer” friends or Likes and you cannot combine pages.
Update: 9/24: There is a very limited set of circumstances under which you can merge pages. Thanks to my friend Mayura for pointing out this nuance. According to Facebook, you can merge two pages if they’re about a similar thing, in which case your less popular page will be merged into the more popular page (by number of Likes) and all of the content, photos and other information on the merged page will be deleted. I haven’t been able to do this in practice, perhaps because the pages were not deemed similar enough by Facebook. You can read the guidelines here.
Your best bet is to set up a single page, perhaps even set it to “unpublished” (under “Manage Permissions” on your Update Info page) and get your ducks in a row before telling the world or even your Great Uncle Ike.
The last thing you want to do is manage multiple pages for the same business. The next-to-last thing you want to do is go begging everyone who likes one page to like another now that you’ve made up your mind which one is “for real”.
Thing 2: If you’re wondering, “Do I need a business page or can I simply use my personal page to market?” the answer is, “You absolutely 100% need a business page.” That is, if you’re marketing a business. Like a lot of small business people, there may be crossover between business and personal. A number of my friends are also my clients, but I do not market on my personal page. I’m personal!
It may be a bit more challenging to get those Likes than to simply send a friend request but it’s also a ton more professional.
If you’re not convinced, consider the fact that you can’t use apps on your personal page, nor can you have more than 5,000 friends. That may seem like a big number now, but when your business takes off, you don’t want to be limited by an arbitrary number.
One Disclaimer
Everything I just told you is true as of… right… now. In five minutes it may not be. Facebook has a reputation for changing things often and unexpectedly. I know of at least one other Facebook post on this blog that puts the profile photo dimensions at 150 x 150 instead of 180 x 180 because at that time, those were the dimensions. If I had to go back and update every Facebook post I’d have to turn it into its own mini-business.
Just remember that things change. If something doesn’t work, stops working or looks kind of… wrong… it’s quite possible that something has changed again. No sweat. There’s bound to be someone out there writing about this stuff!
And You’re Off!
With a good setup you’re ready to start Facebook marketing. We’ll get into more of the nitty-gritty of that next time, but for now you can create a page worry-free or dig into yours and start sprucing it up from the ground up.
On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being “holy crap I still have no idea what to do” and 10 being “I already set up my page as I was reading this”, how confident do you feel that you can get started – or restarted?
If you have any nagging questions or if anything here didn’t quite add up, let me know!
Thank you for this Facebook primer. Although, I set up a business page many aeons ago, I haven’t done much with it. Thanks to this primer I can now update my info.
That’s great, glad to help! There are a few more “getting started” posts coming up about how to use Facebook once you have a page so stay tuned!
I just redid my page but see I need to do more. Great tip on adding milestones!
It’s simple enough to do and it looks good on the page so it’s not so sparse!
I would really like to be able to display my wall posts from facebook on my business website, but I’m not understanding the “facebook developer” information. Is there any simple way to do this?
Hi Carol,
This is a post that I am going to save, because while I know the basics to set up a facebook page, I’m still confused about those apps.
I still don’t like my page yet, because I have to do it professionally, but for now it will do. And I really have to work on those apps, because mine are none existent at the moment 🙂
Thank Carol!
Glad I could help! Personally I use Shortstack and it’s very easy to set up an app. Just pick something simple to start with, like maybe your most recent blog posts, or a video. It’s free so try it out!
I sure could have used this post when I was setting mine up back in January. But at that time it wasn’t the timeline like it is now. I think the only thing I don’t have are extra apps. I have that on my to do list though so thanks for that other service then Lujure. I didn’t care for them to be honest with you.
So when are we going to see a video tutorial from you Carol? This would have been a good one. 🙂
Thanks for sharing, still very in depth “how to”.
~Adrienne
Oh boy, there’s that tempting video idea again!! Maybe I should start with one using a post like this because it’s really more about showing my computer screen than my bad hair 🙂
I do like Shortstack for apps. It’s very easy to use. That might be a good idea for a follow up – how to use it!
This is so well laid out its like a training manual …. excellent article!
Thanks Gordon, I’m planning a whole series of “getting started” stuff because there’s a lot of advice for how to do something once you’ve started but sometimes getting started is half the battle! If you ever have any needs or ideas I’d love to hear them!
If you’re using WordPress, the best thing to do is get a plugin and it will do all the heavy lifting for you. In an HTML site you’d really need to know how to add the code yourself and that can be a bit challenging if you’re not familiar with code. You might want to get a developer to take a look for you.
I have found Facebook to be a great source of traffic and also to make you blog popular but I am unable to create a good page for my website.
Do you mean you are unable to create a good Facebook page for your business (website)? What is it that makes you think it’s not good?
Hi Carol,
Wow… Nice walkthrough for businesses or brands that wanna come up with business pages on Facebook 🙂 Informative, descriptive and easy to follow. I think I need to wait for next one 🙂 I really like to know what tips you offer to follow after creating a page.
On one thing, I got ya Carol 😉 lol… Actually, we can merge 2 Facebook pages but only if they are appearing in same name and administrate by same person. However the one with less likes will merges to one with most likes.
Okies… Now my time 😉 I have something for you Carol. You know I started my blog for information purposes and while on that, I started offering services. Do you think I need to change my page type there. Anyway mostly I share content on page and not service promotional messages. Mostly clients find me on my blog and LinkedIn. Else locally, word of mouth 🙂 I hope I don’t need to change, what do you think of it?
Have a nicey new week ahead dear 🙂
Cheers…
Ah, you’re right! I’ll have to make a correction about merging pages. I have never been able to do it, maybe because the names were not similar so I’m not entirely sure what “similar” means. I’m sure it depends on a million things that Facebook decides 🙂 Thanks for catching that.
Why do you think you might need to change your Facebook page? You mean to set up a business page instead of personal? I think that it’s ok to have a personal page for bloggers and people who are connecting to people in general. But if you’re going to be promoting a business, selling things, etc, then it’s best to have a business page. At any rate, I think that if you have a personal page and share your blogs posts that’s perfectly ok.
Hi Carol,
Yeah, Facebook decides what criteria needs to comply with to merge and I’ve had few similar stories from my friends and blog readers too. Glad you added link there Carol 🙂 It has few clues.
I have a page already Carol 🙂 You know, sharing blog posts, news etc. I meant, that should I change the “type of page” as I start offering services or just keep it as it is without revealing further information on page? 🙂
Cheers…
Oh, I wouldn’t worry about changing the type of page. The important thing is that you can put your blog address and some information about your services, which you can put in the “about” or “description” sections. Honestly I don’t think anyone should get too hung up on it as long as the page has good information!
Gotcha 🙂 Thanks for clearing my doubt on it Carol.
Cheers…
Thanks, made the change!
Cool… 🙂 It’s perfectly alright not to mention my name on post dear…
Oh, I wanted to mention your name because it’s a good update and you know quite a lot about how to use online tools! If you want me to remove it, I will, but otherwise I appreciate your comment and it was a good thing to add!
Nowie… Nowie… 🙂 I meant that if you wanna remove my name, it’s alright 🙂
Thank you for this great tutorial. I have been managing a facebook “local business” page for a fabulous acupuncture clinic for about a year. On that page we have a newsfeed and we can like other businesses. This has been wonderful for interaction and sharing information. I just created a “brand” page for a clothing designer and there is no newsfeed and no way to like all the shops across the US that sell her clothing. I wanted to spotlight shops and interact directly with them. I feel totally cut off. She doesn’t sell out of her physical location so I don’t think I have an option. I would love to have that capability. Do you have any suggestions?
Hi Holly, have you tried running the page as a “Company/Organization”? You can still @ mention other companies in your news feed that way. I would save “brands” for big brands, so unless you’re Apple or Pepsi I would probably not go that route. You could also run it as a local biz if the company has a central location. My business is essentially virtual – we have people who work for and with us all over the country – but we still have a local page because our home base is in NJ. try the company category – I think that will give you what you want.
A client created a personal account and then a business page (which I have recently redesigned). The client now wants me to delete the personal account. Can a business page exist on its own?
Hi Linda,
In order to create a business page, you must have a personal account first. It’s not possible to simply create a business page. With that said, the person who created the account is then the manager of the account. The only way to manage the page is to log in via the personal account. Since there can be more than one manager, your client can assign another manager, then remove him/herself from the page and delete the personal account.
I’m not entirely sure what happens to the page if the only managing account is deleted. At various points different things have happened – the page existed but nobody could manage it; the page ceased to exist – so I’m not quite sure where we are now but I do know that it’s not possible to maintain a business account without a personal account to manage it. So whether the page is deleted or cannot be managed, that’s ineffective either way.
The only way around this is for your client to assign another manager for the page then delete his/her account. That may not be ideal, though, as this would not give your client any access to post, message or do anything with the page.
I dug around some more. Had my client not had the business page I could have converted her personal account to a business page. However, in this case that is not an option. I have read some articles suggesting a dummy account but that is against FB guidelines. The problem with association with a personal account is there is no telling the personal account will continue to work for the company… I think FB needs to rethink admin for business pages.
I agree, there should be differentiation between personal and business but there isn’t. Yes, you can convert a personal account to a business page but that doesn’t seem like it would be helpful in this case. I know some people have had problems because they’ve had their personal accounts suspended and ended up with no way to manage their business page. And yes, the whole “set up a dummy account” thing is problematic because it violates Facebook’s terms. I’ve done that for testing purposes and eventually they do shut down the account because it isn’t real. Or they require you to prove that it is real (which you can’t) so they shut it down anyway. It’s definitely a conundrum.
I just set up a business page through my personal account and need to get back in it to fix some things. The problem is there is no edit page showing up anywhere for me to be able to do that. What do I need to do?
When you log into your personal account, you should have a list of pages that you manage on the left. When you click the page, there will be an edit button near the top right, above the cover photo. You have to be logged into your personal account to do this though. You can’t do it by simply going to the page (if you’re logged out).
Excellent tutorial Carol Lynn! Someone just posted this link inside Marie Ferleo’s B School. I’ve been learning about FB business pages there, but plan to post this link on my site for others who are not B School members, best free FB business page tutorial I’ve seen. KUDOS to YOU!
Thank you so much, Carolan, I appreciate hearing that and I’m really glad that this helped. It can be confusing at first because there are so many options. Plus Facebook is notorious for changing things so it’s also good to stay updated on whatever is latest. How are you enjoying B School?
I ADORE B School! Once you enroll you get lifetime access & this year is my second time around. I learned a ton last year but oh MY – easy to become overwhelmed by it all! At that time I really did not have my own web system set up yet, thought I’d do so during the course, but wowza – twas just too much for me at the time. That’s OK though because now I am more ready. Amazing to find so many brilliant ladies in one place, all eager to help one another in whatever ways they can.
One B School member helped me a TON with my FB page, then we started a private group within B School specifically for that purpose, to help others with same. Actually that group just opened this AM, and your link showed up there on the 1st day, now featured there, pretty cool! Women helping women, love it! Just tweeted this too!
I know what you mean about “overwhelmed”. I’ve joined groups like that too, and there is SOOO much info you don’t know where to start. And if you’re like me, “I don’t know where to start” means “I don’t start”.
I’m pretty excited to have my post listed in your forum 🙂 I wonder how it got there? Whoever put it there, I’m grateful! And glad to help. Let me know if any other questions or concerns pop up about Facebook or anything marketing, and if I can help, I will. (And it would be good fodder for more blogs!)
Super Well-Done! Thanks for the ease of instruction. I’m relatively new to company pages. Please tell me how to bounce between my Admin/Timeline (default view) and the NewsFeed. It’s easy with personal pages; not so much with Company Pages. Is that because it doesn’t exist? Also, easy to add/invite friends on Personal page with “suggested friends.” How to add friends/fans/followers with Company page? Thanks!!!
You don’t really have a newsfeed for your business page… it’s just Timeline. Everything appears there that you or others post on your page. As a business page, there’s no newsfeed where you can follow your fans or other brands – that’s all done on your personal newsfeed.
As for adding fans, that’s the biggest challenge! You can’t simply send a request like you do with your personal account. It’s a marketing process all by itself. You have to find ways to get your page in front of your audience (whether through ads, emails, or other marketing), ask them to “like” the page and that usually involves some form of incentive – enter a contest, download something free, etc. It takes time and continued effort, and always provide something interesting and/or of value to your followers!
Carol, you are 100% correct regarding your main point here: the real way to gain fans is to earn them, by continuously providing value over time. This requires an ongoing effort and it is certainly challenging! 🙂
FYI: a few technical corrections (which do *not* detract from your main message!):
[1] When you “Use Facebook as:” your Page, you actually *do* have a News Feed. Click on the Facebook logo above the upper-left hand corner of your Admin Panel and see. It will show the feed of updates from any Pages that your own Page might have “Liked” (while using FB as your Page).
[2] You *can* send a request (to “Like” your Page — similar to the way a personal account can send a friend-request), but only to your Friends. Because of this, some Page owners adopt the tactic of mass-Friending potential fans (and for other reasons, also fans), even though this defeats the original intention behind “Friendship”. Among the many reasons why this is not so smart, is that the 5,000 Friend-limit for personal accounts will allow this tactic fact to only go so far.
Sounds like you know all the little back door secrets! Yes, I do get plenty of those requests to “like” a page though I hadn’t thought about mass-friending people just for that purpose. Facebook is a tricky little beast and they are making it harder and harder for businesses to do anything without paying so I’m sure people will be taking more advantage of whatever tactics they can.
Social networking websites provide one of the most effective ways of marketing. One of most popular social networking is Facebook. Facebook has more than 1 billions users. With the help of Facebook business owners can enhance their business (he/she can increase their fan following,promote their product )
Hi Carol, thank you! very helpful…can you change a page say from pruduct to company once its been created and published? thxs!
Yes you can change the page category after its been set up. So if you choose “product” now you can change it to “company” later. Keep in mind that will also change the fields available to you so you may need to rejigger content.
Hi Carol,
Thanks for all the easy to understand instruction. I was wondering if you could explain how to make it a requirement for people the “Like” you page before they can like or tag a photo I post on my page. I am a photographer and I notice several other photographers require people to like the page before they can tag, like, or post comments on a photo. I can’t figure out how they do that.
Thanks,
Tammy
http://www.GreenApplePortraits.com
http://www.Facebook.com/GreenApplePortraitsLLC
Hi Tammy,
I don’t believe this is an option any longer. At one point you could require people to like your page before accessing it but that changed some time ago. If you know of a site that is implementing this (and doesn’t simply have their comments turned off) I’d be interested to see it. I can try to dig a little deeper but to the best of my knowledge, this is something Facebook removed a while ago.
Carol, I created a page for my youth football organization. Even though it says “you are posting as (organization)” I cannot post on people’s timelines or photos. I also cannot send friend requests. I know of two people on my personal friends list that use their facebook as a business. They can send friend requests and private messages, like things, and comment on stuff just like a full personal facebook account. The only difference is that instead of their real name, they have their business name. That is what I want to do with my organization, but I can’t figure out how to do it. Every time I try to change my name to reflect my organization, it says “facebook only lets you use your real name”. I want my display name to be Cuba Youth Football League, and I want to be able to friend request every parent of my players so that I can post updates about practices, games, etc. Can you help me?
Hi David,
Do you have an example of a page that does this? Only personal pages can send friend requests and interact with other profiles. As a “page” you can only post to other pages and not to personal profiles.
It’s possible your friend set the personal profile up with the business name and it was accepted. Trying to change yours now may be triggering a filter, possibly because the company name is long or obviously not a person’s name.
If you can show me an example of a page that does this I may be able to discern something from it.
Hello,
I was just wondering after you change the name on the fan page, does the date it joined facebook change as well?
No, that will not change your joined date. You can change your “started” date manually, as in the day you started your business, but both of those things are independent of the actual join date.
Thanks carol! I would like to create a FB page for the company I work for, yet when I search their name, there is a list of a bunch of pages others have already created on the company. What would you suggest on how to create an “official company page” that stands out from the rest?
It’s possible that there are other companies with the same name. That happens often, and the only thing you can do is be creative! Since two pages can’t have the same name, you may want to try an abbreviation, adding an extra descriptive word or use a representative word but not your company name.
If you think that someone is impersonating your business (ie: using your information, logo, etc) you can report the page to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=208282075858952 I can’t vouch for the speed or what kinds of results you’ll get though.
Finally, if you have a large organization and you think someone else has created the page and left it languishing, you could try contacting the administrator (via the page) or sending out a company email to get to the bottom of it.
Hi Carol I set up a FB buisness page through my personal account and confirmed via txt msg. But now it is not showing I’m admin so I cant access it as admin, what can I do? Any ideas greatly apprieciated. Site is up and running as I can find it when I type in the URL
Is there any admin on the account at all? Is it possible you could have used a different email address when you set up your account? It’s possibly a glitch. It’s hard to say without knowing what you did exactly but make sure you’re using the correct account to log in. When you say you can find it via URL, did you already set up a custom url? Could it be possible that you’re finding a site someone else set up with a similar name?
Hi Carol…I’m confused about the fb personal page and fb business page. I have a personal page with over 300 friends and have created a bus. page that only has 50 likes so I am assuming that my personal page isn’t linked to my fb page. Is that correct? I’m asking because I have a friend that wants me to create a fb Busines page similar to mind but doesn’t want anyone on business page to see her personal page. What is the best way to go about this? Thanks for your response. By the way my personal page is https://www.facebook.com/cindy.ricardo?ref=tn_tnmn and my business page is at https://www.facebook.com/acaringcounselor?ref=hl
Hi Cindy,
Your personal page and any business pages that you set up or manage are not connected in any way to the public. You need to start with a personal account because you cannot create a stand-alone business account on Facebook. Anyone with a personal account can then create a business page and then you can assign one or more people to be administrators on that page (if you want to – not required).
So let’s say you create a page for your friend. Then you can add her as an admin and you will both be able to manage the page, but neither of your personal accounts will be connected to it or identified by it.
people can message/email me on my facebook business account but i can only reply to them – i can’t start a new email through my business account. any way to change that?
When you have a business page you can’t initiate a conversation with a person. You can only reply – or message once they have messaged you first. That’s ultimately to protect people from being bombarded by messages from brands but it does prevent you from initiating a conversation.
aah, gotcha. thanks carol. i so appreciate the feedback.
Hi Carol
I have set up a FB business page, it is connected to my personal page, how do I change this ? I would like them separate.
Thank You
Ruth
Hi Ruth,
You need to have a personal page before you can set up a business page but that doesn’t mean they’re connected. You are simply an administrator of the page, but not personally connected to it. In other words, nobody who visits your business page will be able to access your personal page (unless you personally friend them, of course).
Technically, one does *not* need a personal account to set up a Page (“fan page”, “business page”). Pages can also be created from within a “business account”.
See here, for example:
http://allfacebook.com/facebook-business-account_b5986
That must be fairly new since I wrote this… or I was unfamiliar with it. Interesting workaround. They do mention to be careful as this is sort of a workaround and not precisely how Facebook wants things. Interestingly, you can now also have a personal page, build your friend list and then convert it to a business page. That’s another idea. Not sure why you’d want to though, now that Facebook has made it almost impossible to reach our fans organically. Thanks for the tip!
Hi Carol,i cannot find map option in my page setting , its shows only 3 column address,city/town,postal code, can u please answere how i can fine the location via map/
It depends on the category you’ve selected. Things have changed a lot since I wrote this post so you may want to try choosing a different category and seeing what options you have for information.