Set up your Facebook business page to start attracting potential customers and discover best practices for optimizing your page.
A Facebook business page is a profile on the Facebook platform that corresponds to a business or brand, unlike a personal Facebook profile, which represents a single individual. A business page is commercial in nature and showcases the business’s products and services, and in many cases, offers content that the business’s audience would find useful.
Setting up a business page on Facebook can be a great way to promote your business online. According to Statista, Facebook is the most widely used social media platform, with almost 3 billion active users at the end of 2022 [1]. With the right strategies, you may be able to connect with many potential customers on Facebook and use the platform to grow your business.
By creating and developing a Facebook business page, you can:
Provide content that informs and entertains your audience.
Promote events.
Gain an understanding of your target audience.
Sell products and services.
Create a group to offer a community experience to your audience.
Send traffic to your website.
Set up paid ad campaigns and measure their performance.
Manage multiple pages from one admin panel.
Manage an Instagram account.
Read more: What Is a Social Media Marketer? And How to Become One
Facebook is always adding new features and updating how pages work, offering businesses multiple ways to showcase their offerings and engage with potential customers. Here are just four of many recent features to get the most out of your business page:
1. More control over the kind of content that your ads appear next to on Facebook and Instagram
2. QR codes that lead people directly to your Facebook group’s About page
3. Detailed policies and guidelines for selling on Facebook to ensure a safe community experience
4. A “sharing to stories” option allows users to share content from your business’s app directly to Stories on Facebook or Instagram.
In this section, you’ll use our quick-start guide to create a business page on Facebook. By the end of the process, you can get your page up and running so customers can find, follow, and engage with your content on this platform. Details for each step follow this checklist:
Before going to Facebook, you first need to have all of your materials at your fingertips so that once you set up the page, you can add individual page components easily.
Gather as much of the following as possible:
Elements of your brand’s identity, including the name, logo, fonts, colors, graphics, and messaging guidelines
Company images, including headshots of everyone on your team, as well as a group shot
Product images and descriptions
A short description of your business that introduces page visitors to what you offer
Content marketing pieces, including videos, links to landing pages and blog articles, customer stories, etc.
Your website’s URL
Using Canva, Photoshop, or another graphic design tool, you can resize cover and profile images to fit Facebook’s dimensions. Cover images must be at least 720 pixels wide, while profile images should be 320 pixels wide by 320 pixels tall.
Now that you have brand collateral handy, log in to your personal Facebook account, navigate to the menu in the upper right corner of the screen, and select the option to create a new Facebook business page. A new screen will appear for adding basic page information:
In the Page Name section, enter your business or brand name.
In the Category section, start typing a category such as education or finance, and select the most appropriate category from the options.
In the Description section, enter a short description of your business, what you offer, and the kind of customers you serve.
Once you’ve entered the basic page information, the next thing to do is add high-res cover and profile images (at least 300 dpi). Select images that will showcase your brand identity and make a good first impression on page visitors. Ask yourself:
Which images best communicate what your brand is all about?
Which variation of your logo—primary, secondary, submark, or favicon—will display the best as either the cover or profile image?
Which ones illustrate the experience customers can expect from your product or service?
Once your page has the basic information and images, the next thing to do is add business details so that page visitors can more easily get in touch with you. Details include:
Website URL
Phone number
Email address
Business hours
Location
Under the cover image, you’ll see an option to add a button to encourage page visitors to take action. Selecting an action button can make it easier to nurture your audience in specific ways, depending on your goals or initiatives at a given time. For example:
The “follow” action button can be useful for growing your following and gaining exposure on the Facebook platform.
The “book now” action button can be useful for scheduling appointments with potential customers and speaking with them directly.
The “shop on website” action button can be useful for driving traffic to your sales pages where products are available for purchase.
Review your existing content and select three or four pieces to post to your new page to give your first page visitors and followers a branded experience.
Here are examples:
A “welcome” video introducing your brand, your page, and what you offer customers
An image with a caption that addresses a problem or challenge that your target audience faces
A poll asking followers to vote on content they’d like to see on your page
With your page’s information, imagery, and initial content set up, you should now invite people you’re friends with on Facebook to like and follow your page. This step will give your new page a boost and may garner some valuable comments and responses on your posts.
Here are three additional ways to gain exposure and get more page followers:
Post the new business page and/or individual posts to your personal profile.
Ask new page followers and Facebook friends to share with their networks.
Use some budget to boost organic posts and reach a broader audience.
Launch a brand awareness ad campaign through the Meta Business Suite.
For more ideas on setting up your Facebook business page, watch this video from the Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate.
Remember: Building a Facebook business page can open up all kinds of possibilities for your business, including building brand awareness, creating community, and driving sales. Keep these best practices in mind as you develop your business page and gain a following:
Publishing high-quality content regularly can help your Facebook business page gain traction. Take your schedule, responsibilities, and audience preferences into account when determining your content calendar. Some examples include posting several times a day, once a day, every other day, or once a week.
Engagement is an important factor in building a presence on social media. Monitor activity on your posts and respond to comments. To spark more engagement, include a question or call-to-action on posts. For example:
“What are your top questions about [name of product]? Post below.”
“How do you feel today? Post a GIF below that shows us.”
You'll need to promote your Facebook page regularly to get more views, likes, follows, and other engagements. You can do this using organic methods like sharing posts to your personal profile, your email list, other social media profiles, as well as asking others to share your content. If you have a budget available, paid ad campaigns can make your page content visible to users outside of your network and thus scale your promotion efforts.
As you refine your content and social media strategies, click on the Page Insights tab in the control panel to discover how your page is performing. Learning from insights like the ones listed below can help you tailor content, improve calls to action, and adjust your campaigns to reach your target customers more effectively.
Page views
Actions that visitors take on your page
Post engagements
Audience demographics such as age, gender, and geographic location
Having a strategy is crucial for streamlining your Facebook business page activity and measuring your success. With a strategy in place:
Use business page templates and tabs (under Page Settings) to your advantage. For example, selecting the “Venues” template may be useful for businesses that operate at a physical location. You can rearrange the order of page tabs so that the most important information appears first.
Like other pages and join groups as your page to gain exposure.
Post content to the page’s story to connect with followers more personally, get information out quickly to your audience, and offer a behind-the-scenes view of your business.
Enable Facebook Messenger for your page and adjust the settings, such as displaying response time and sending instant replies, to create the best experience for your audience.
Pin a priority post to the top of the page to get more views and engagement.
Add page roles as your team grows.
Taking online courses can be a great way to build skills for marketing your business on social media or exploring a career in social media marketing. In partnership with Meta, Coursera offers two professional certificate programs in which you can learn to establish a business’s social presence, create content for posts, design ad campaigns, test their effectiveness, and more.
Learn about these programs here:
Statista. “Number of monthly active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2021, https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/.” Accessed September 9, 2022.
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