This is how you set up a Facebook Business page for your company

The use of social networking sites is an effective way to promote your business. As such, one of the best ways to connect with your target market and build a following for your company is to create a Facebook Business page.

Facebook gives you an opportunity to show a “face”, “name”, and “personality” to your brand. Given that the page represents your company, genuine communication, one-on-one conversations, and non-business interaction show the human side of your business.

Aside from building a community, a Facebook Business page is good for your SEO. You are directing traffic to your website by sharing posts and links – and this action can give an SEO boost if they are indexed by the search engines.

^{(Figure 1: The 1902 Software Facebook Business page)}

Setting up a Facebook Business page

1. Essential information

You will need the basics such as a page name, a short description of your business, and some graphics for your profile and cover photo.

• Your profile photo can simply be your logo.
• The cover photo can be a general slogan or a specific banner if you’re having some special sales or other events. The design should align with your brand and your site’s design.

It’s best to fill up as much information as you can when you’re setting up so that any potential customer that stumbles upon your page can find the information they’re looking for. Some of the most important are:

• Contact information
• Location
• Business hours
• ‘Your story’ (A longer and detailed description for your business)
• Call to action (The default is ‘Send message’, which will take the person to Messenger and allow them to chat with your page. If you want to drive them to your website or webshop, you can select ‘Learn more’ or ‘Shop Now’.)

2. Posting schedule

For the first few months after you’ve created your page, you will be experimenting a lot so that you can gather enough data. There is really no one-size-fits-all standard for this, because it will largely depend on your audience.

We recommend posting once a day for at least the first month if possible, so that you can accurately gauge:

• What days of the week do you get the most engagement? (‘Engagement’ is any action done by a person with your post—like, comment, share, like page, message, etc.)
• What time period is your audience most active? Is it mornings, lunch break, or at the end of the workday?

It would be best if you can line up your posts as early as now so that you don’t have to scramble around for something to post every day. There are automatic post scheduling tools available, but you can just as easily keep your posts in an Excel sheet and just set aside a time every day to post.

3. Posts

Generally, videos get the most engagement on Facebook, followed by image posts. Business pages rarely publish text posts. Aside from showcasing your products, you can also share short ‘tips and tricks’, trivia, etc. that your audience may like.

What’s your main goal for the Facebook page?
Is it to get people to visit your webshop when they see you on Facebook? If so, then it’s better to share a link every time you post. This way, if they’re interested in the post, they can easily click on it and be directed to your website or webshop, and not have to click on your page and then click on your link from there.

Link posts also let you add more information to the post—a caption, headline, and a link description.

^{(Figure 2: An example post for 1902 Software Facebook Business page)}

If your goal is to simply raise awareness for your brand, then normal static images will do.

Remember to add URL parameters so that you can measure how much of your traffic is coming from your Facebook page. Here’s an example of a link with URL parameters:

https://1902software.com/careers?utm_source=facebook(1902)&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=careers

When a person clicks on your post with this URL, it will show up in your Analytics dashboard like this:

^{(Figure 3: The Facebook Analytics dashboard for 1902 Software page. This gives you a better insight into where your traffic is coming from, and lets you know whether your post is doing what it’s supposed to do. In this example, we know that this post (this one is actually an ad) brought in 17 people into our website.)}

4. Page Management History Tool 

This is a brand-new feature of Facebook pages that can help multiple users to see every single action made on and by your page. It shows when the action is taken and who enacted them.

^{(Figure 4: An example of a Facebook Analytics dashboard, highlighting the
Page Management History tool menu location.)}