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| Dec 22, 2011
The Facebook interface is anything but intuitive, making it annoying and time consuming for business owners who want to get started and test social media. Here is a quick start guide.
Setting up a page for your business will let users “like” your page, advertising their endorsement of your business in the info portion of their Facebook account and putting your updates in their news feed. This will send them any of the updates you post, and expose your business to their friends. Therein lies the viral “magic” of Facebook: it fuels online word of mouth.
Here is how you activate Facebook Pages on your Facebook account and create a dedicated page that represents your business and is open to interaction with customers.
If you don’t have a personal Facebook account, enter http://www.facebook.com to sign up for an account. You must have a personal Facebook account before you can set a page up for your business. Once you have logged in to your account:
1) Before you begin, gather the information you would like to upload to your page, including a digital copy of your logo, photos, product information, contact info and anything else you want people to know. Make sure your logo image is approximately 640x480 pixels in size, anything larger will be scaled down by Facebook. Facebook accepts most file types, but make sure if you are using Photoshop to convert your images to .jpg format before uploading (Facebook does not accept .psd files).
2) On the right side menu in your “News Feed” page, click on “Ads and Pages”. You’ll be taken to a section of Facebook where you’ll be able to manage your pages and ad campaigns, run reports, update billing, and get your tracking codes.
3) Choose “Pages” from the menu on your right, this will take you to the list all Facebook Fan pages that you have administrative rights to.
4) To create your first page, or a new page, just click on the “Create Page” button to the right of the screen, near the top of the page.
5) You will be presented with the initial options for your Facebook Page. Click next to ‘local business’ on the left-hand side and select the category your business would like to be promoted under. Type in the name of your business below, and click the final box to accept Facebook’s terms and conditions. You CANNOT CHANGE the name of your page after you create it without creating a new page, so make sure to double-check your spelling.
6) Now you may begin entering your business information and uploading photos to personalize your page.
a) Your page is automatically published. We recommend that you unpublish it initially so that you can update your page without anyone seeing it.
b) To do that, from your Page click on “Edit Page” below the page image (which is a question mark placeholder).
c) Then, choose “Edit Page” below your page name again. Under “Settings” choose “Edit”. In the box that pops up you can select your country, age and visibility restrictions.
d) Choose “Unpublished (visible to no one but admins). Then, click “Save Changes”.
7) Now you can update or change anything, but the name, of your page. Go back to your Page’s main page.
a) To add your logo or a photo to represent your business, mouse over the box marked by a question and click on ”Change Picture”, and then follow the menu mark above your.
b) You can edit each Tab on the top of your page just by clicking on it. Make sure to update the Info Tab.
c) Note that Facebook only displays five tabs by default, so make sure to click on the plus sign to the right of the bar to access other applications that will be represented as tabs.
d) To add new tabs to your page, just click on the tab name from the plus sign drop down menu
8) When you’re satisfied with the look and feel of you Facebook back, make sure to refer back to step 6 and publish you page by choosing “Published (publicly visible)” and begin your business’ social media presence.
9) Now your Facebook page is up and running! You can invite customers and friends to become a fan of your business by clicking the “like” button and therefore receive updates from your page. You will show up in their search bar once they have become a fan, as well.
Congratulations! Your business can now suggest your page to other Facebook users by clicking the ‘suggest to friends’ link under your page’s photo.