Facebook is definitely the largest social media site out there with over 1.65 billion users. If you’re going to choose one social media network to focus on then Facebook is probably your best choice.
You’re probably not going to amass millions of fans for your business but you can definitely use Facebook to get some additional traffic to your website, especially if you’re willing to spend a little bit of money on advertising.
As I’ve mentioned before I’m not the biggest fan of social media and I don’t like spending a lot of time on it. I would encourage you to also not spend too much time and don’t get caught up trying to raise metrics such as page Likes, that number doesn’t really mean anything anyways.
Your goals with Facebook should be to 1) get people to your website and 2) help people discover your site or business (and then send them to your website).
Anything else you probably don’t have the time or the money to do effectively and are probably much better putting your efforts into other areas of your business.
Remember that you have no control over Facebook but you have full control over your website so always concentrate on getting people to your site, not getting people to your Facebook page.
Table of Contents
Creating a Facebook Page for Your Business
- Step 1: Create a Company Social Media Email Account
- Step 2: Use Your New Company Email Address to Sign Up for Facebook
- Step 3: Create Your Business Page
The Different Sections of Your Facebook Page
- General Settings
- Messaging Settings
- Post Attribution
- Notification Settings
- Page Roles
- People and Other Pages
- Preferred Page Audience
- Apps
- Instagram Ads
- Featured
- Page Support
- Activity Log
Responding to Facebook Messages as Your Page
Inviting People to Like Your Page
How does Facebook Decide Who Sees Your Posts?
Creating a Facebook Page for Your Business
The first thing you need to do is create a Facebook page for your business.
Step 1: Create a Company Social Media Email Account
Whenever you sign up your company for a social media account (or pretty much any other service on the Internet) always use an email address that you or your company controls.
If you use a personal email address or worse, have an employee use their personal email address this can cause huge problems down the line if that employee is ever fired or leaves the company.
By creating a company email account to sign up for things like Facebook you make sure that your company always has full control over the social media account and if you ever need to change passwords or lock an employee out you can.
You can create any email address that you want using Gmail, Hotmail, your own company’s domain or whatever. The important thing is that you control that account.
If you already created a Facebook page for your business using a personal email account or one of your employees already created it don’t panic. You’ll be able to take control of the page and I’ll cover that later in this post.
Step 2: Use Your New Company Email Address to Sign Up for Facebook
Head over to Facebook and create a new account using that email address you just created.
You can put whatever you want for the information just try to make it sound like a real person. Facebook might remove your account if it doesn’t think you’re a real person.
The birthday is used if you ever forget your password so if you put a random birthday here make sure you remember it.
You won’t ever use this Facebook account for anything other than creating the business page anyways.
Step 3: Create Your Business Page
Once you’ve got your company Facebook account set up it’s time to create your business page.
You can’t use the account you just created for your business and I’ve seen lots of companies try to do this. Business pages have additional features that personal accounts don’t have. Personal accounts also have a limit of 5,000 friends while business pages can have unlimited followers.
Facebook doesn’t make it very obvious where to go to make a Business page but you’ll find the option at Facebook.com/pages.
At the very top right of the window under More you’ll find the Create Page link.
After clicking Create Page you’ll be taken to a category selection page.
Each category will have a different set of options when you click on them. Local Business or Place for example will ask for your address so your business will show up in maps on Facebook.
If you’re creating a blog under your own name select Artist, Band or Public Figure and then select Blogger from the category drop down.
For this post I’m going to be creating a page for a blogger. All pages work the same way, you’ll just add a bit of different information at this step depending on your category. This is so that your page can appear easier in the Facebook search results.
Once you’ve selected your main category and then entered the required information click the Get Started button.
Next you’re going to fill in your page information in a couple of steps. You can skip these steps if you want but it’s easier to just fill in this information now.
First is your page description:
The description is a short little bio that tells people what your page is about. It also acts sort of as a meta description for the Facebook search results.
You can also enter the URL for your website here and you’ll get a free back link to your site which will help your search engine optimization slightly.
This information will also show up in a little about box in the sidebar of your page.
The next step is where you upload your profile picture.
The profile picture is the little square picture that’s going to appear next to your posts. It’s also at the top of your page somewhat larger.
It’s best to keep this simple since the picture’s going to be pretty small by your posts. It’s best to use a photo of your face or your company’s logo. The picture is going to be cropped into a square which might cause some difficulties if your company’s logo doesn’t easily fit into a square.
The next step is to add your page to your Facebook favourites.
All this does is add a little link to the page in the sidebar that you see when you log into Facebook to make it a bit easier to access your page.
If you don’t add the page to your favourites a link will still be in your sidebar just a bit further down the page.
The last step here is to select your preferred page audience.
This is who you’d ideally like to see your page, your target demographic or ideal customer.
No matter what you put here anyone will be able to find your page however Facebook will try to show it more to people who will be more interested. This affects the Facebook search results, suggested pages and stuff like that.
If you’re a local business then you’ll want to select your city so more people in your location will hopefully find your page.
If you’re a website or a blog then you can leave?the locations section blank and just add some relevant interests and maybe an age group.
When you’re done with this step hit Save and you’ll be taken to your new page which is pretty empty.
There will be a couple of tutorial messages that you can read or ignore.
The first thing we’ll do to make our page stand out is to add a cover photo. This is a big photo that goes across the top of the page.
Mouse over the little camera in the upper left and click on Add a Cover.
The cover photo is 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels smaller. If you upload a larger image you’ll be able to crop it and if you upload a slightly smaller image it’ll be stretched to fill the space.
I like everything to be nice and perfect so I always crop my image to exactly 851×315 pixels in Photoshop first. If you’re not sure what the means or how to do it don’t worry, just upload as large a photo as you can and crop it inside Facebook.
You can put pretty much whatever you want for your cover photo as long as it doesn’t break Facebook’s rules.
If you didn’t already, click on Add Photo over the flag to upload a profile picture.
Here’s a screenshot of my page with a cover photo and profile picture.
It definitely looks a lot better with these images.
Next you can add a call-to-action button to the top of your page to lead people back to your website (or somewhere else if you want). On my page I have a Learn More button. You can only choose from a list of buttons.
This will open up a window that looks like this:
Under Choose a Button you have a bunch of different options. Most options like “book now” or “contact us” let you add a link to a specific page on your website.
If you have a specific video that explains what you’re about you could upload it and select Watch Video as your button.
As I mentioned before I like to use Facebook to send traffic to my site so I just choose the Learn More button and put a link to my site.
In general people probably aren’t going to be visiting your Facebook page itself. It’s more likely that they’ll see your posts in their news feed and they’ll interact more with the post itself rather than your page.
Select whichever button you prefer and then don’t worry about it too much.
Finally you have your page’s Like button which lets you “Like” the page.
If you click this button you’ll Like the page using the Facebook account you’re logged in as. Most likely this is the empty account that you created during step 2 but that still counts as one Like.
Go ahead and like the page with your main account and feel free to encourage friends and family to like the page too.
Once you click Like the button will change to say Liked and have a little down arrow on it. If you mouse over the button you’ll see a drop down that looks like this:
From here you can unlike the page and change how you see the page’s posts.
In the earlier days of Facebook if someone liked your page they would see all of your updates. Then Facebook began to change it so that less and less of your followers would see your updates so they could sell advertising and you would have to pay to get more people to see your posts.
Now very few of your followers will see your posts unless you pay to boost them.
With these settings however users can opt in and not miss any of your posts.
If you click on the pencil icon by in your news feed you’ll see these options:
If you select See First then new posts from the page will show up at the top of your news feed unlike the Default option where they’ll show up sort of in a chronological order along with the rest of the posts in your feed.
You can also click Unfollow which will prevent any posts from showing up in your news feed. You can use this for example if you want to show support by liking a page but you never want to see their posts.
If you click on Notifications you’ll see these options:
Here your followers can opt into receiving notifications whenever you make a new post. You want to encourage all your followers to opt into receiving notifications for all your posts.
Your posts still won’t necessarily show up in their news feed but they’ll receive a Facebook notification when you’ve posted something new.
That’s pretty much everything you need to do to set up your Facebook page. Next we’ll take a look at what’s on your page itself.
The Different Sections of Your Facebook Page
Your Facebook page is broken up into a couple of different sections and will look differently depending on whether you’re logged in as an administrator or just a regular Facebook user.
Your page consists of a couple of different tabs, the main ones being Timeline, About, Photos, Likes and Videos. You can add more tabs to your Facebook page but these are the main ones.
Timeline
Your timeline is the default view for your page and is where all your posts will appear. People who visit your page will be able to scroll through a chronological list of all your posts with the most recent ones at the top.
The timeline is divided into a sidebar on the left and the main area on the right where your posts appear. Here’s a screenshot of how my Facebook timeline looks to a regular Facebook user.
In the sidebar you have a box showing the total number of likes.
This is followed by the About box I mentioned earlier where you can write a quick description for your page and include a link to your site.
Below this is a collection of the most recent photos that were uploaded to the page.
Below that is a section where you can see the posts that other visitors leave on your page. When someone leaves a comment on your page it doesn’t show up on the timeline itself, it’ll instead show up in this box. This keeps your timeline much cleaner since it’s not cluttered up with random posts from random people.
There’s also a section for events and if you haven’t created any events then the box won’t show up.
If you’re logged into Facebook as an administrator of the page there’s also a section here that you’ll see called People Also Liked which shows you related pages you might want to check out or follow.
The larger area on the right is the actual Facebook timeline and this is where all your Facebook posts will appear. If you’re logged into Facebook you’ll see a box at the top where you can make a new post.
About
The next tab is the About tab where you can view the information you’ve entered about your business.
It’s up to you how much information you want to enter here. I just kept mine simple with the description and website link.
If you’re logged into Facebook as a page administrator you’ll see a bunch of places to enter information.
You can choose how much of this information you want to enter and what you want to leave blank.
Once you page receives at least 25 fans you get the option to enter a Facebook Web Address which gives your page a much cleaner URL. By default your page’s URL is something complicated like:?https://www.facebook.com/Example-Page-1021218571297429/
Photos and Videos
The Photos and Videos tabs simply show a collection of all the photos or videos uploaded to your page.
You can organize your photos into albums just like you would with a personal Facebook account.
If you don’t see the videos tab just click on More.
Likes
The Likes tab will give you ?graph and some information about how many people liked your page and how many people have mentioned your page.
If you’re logged in to Facebook it’ll also show you how many of your friends also like the page on the right side there.
I haven’t had any new likes in the last couple of weeks which is why the graph looks so sad.
Pretty much everything you do on Facebook will happen on the timeline and you’ll probably never need to visit any of these other tabs.
Page Settings
At the very top right of your Facebook page you’ll find a link for your page settings.
Clicking this will take you to the General Settings.
General Settings
Favourites
The first option simply lets you add a link to the page to the favourites section of your Facebook account. You most likely did this already when you created the page.
Page Visibility
Page Visibility lets you publish or unpublish your page. When you created your page it was published by default and anyone on Facebook can find it.
If it’s not ready yet or you don’t want the public seeing it for some reason you can unpublish it here and then only the page administrators will be able to see it.
Visitor Posts
Here you can set it to allow people to post on your page. Their posts will show up in the Visitor Posts section of your page’s sidebar that I mentioned earlier.
You can set it to completely not allow people to make posts on your page, let anyone make posts and you also have the option to hold posts until they’ve been reviewed by a moderator.
Audience Optimization for Posts
This is a relatively new feature that Facebook added recently. If you turn this on you’ll have a new little icon when you make a post that lets you select an audience.
This lets you select your preferred audience of who you’d like to see the post based on what interests they have or a few other factors such as age and gender.
For example if my audience is equal parts men and women and I make a post that only women will care about I can select women in my audience restrictions so only women will see this post show up in their news feed.
This option won’t necessarily increase how many of your followers see the post in their news feed?but it will increase the amount of engagement (likes, comments, etc.) that the post will get.
Facebook is still only showing your post to a tiny percentage of your followers but this tiny percentage is interested in the topic you select so more people should respond rather than if you didn’t select an audience?and chose to show the post to all your followers.
Clicking that target icon brings up the preferred audience window:
Here you can enter various interests and people with those interests will be more likely to see your post.
If you click on Audience Restrictions you’ll get some additional targeting options:
With these options you can set it so that only people of a certain age, gender, in a certain location or who speak a certain language see your post.
Again, these options won’t necessarily increase the amount of people who see your post but by showing your post to the people most interested it should increase the amount of engagement.
The amount of Likes, comments and what not a post receives is a factor in Facebook’s news feed algorithm so the higher your engagement the more likely additional?people will see your post.
Messages
This just has one option, if selected it’ll add a button to your page which lets people send you a private message.
Facebook will even track how long it takes you to reply to people’s messages as well at the top of the page sidebar if you’re logged in as the admin.
Tagging Ability
This option is disabled by default and if you enable it it’ll let people add their own tags to your photos and videos.
I don’t really see any reason why you would need this option. people can still add tags to comments they leave on your photos and videos anyways.
Others Tagging this Page
This lets people tag your page in their post. People might do this because they post something they feel you might be interested in and you’ll get a notification when they tag you. Another common reason people might tag your page is to give you credit for something they post.
This option is enabled by default and I would leave it enabled.
Country Restrictions
Here you can set it so that your page is only visible to people who live in certain countries.
If you’re a business that absolutely only does business in your own country then you might want to enable this to prevent people from other countries inquiring about your products or services and thus wasting your time.
I really wouldn’t worry about restricting countries though.
Age Restrictions
This lets you only show your page to people of a certain age. If you page has adult content for example you’d want to restrict it to 18+.
Page Moderation
This option lets you specify a collection of banned words for your page. If anyone makes a post using these words it’ll automatically be marked as spam.
You can use this to block offensive comments, spam or anything else you don’t want on your page.
Profanity Filter
This can be set to off, medium or strong and will block different levels of profanity depending on what you select.
Similar Page Suggestions
At the bottom of your page’s sidebar is a section for recommended pages.
If you enable this option your page can show up on other similar pages as a recommendation but it’ll also show similar recommended pages on your page.
In general I don’t like advertising other people’s things on my pages but it’s worth showing up as a similar page to get extra traffic to yours so I’d leave this option enabled.
Post in Multiple Languages
If you enable this option you’ll see a new option when you make posts which lets you make several versions of the same post but in different languages.
If you have a large percentage of your audience that speaks French for example?you can make an English version of your post and?another version in French.
The English users will see the English version of your post and the French users will see the French version of your post.
Comment Ranking
If you leave this option unchecked the comments that people leave on your posts will be sorted chronologically. If you check this option the comments that get the most Likes and replies will appear higher up than the other comments.
Download Page
This will take you to a separate area of Facebook where you can download everything related to your page such as posts, photos, the about section and more.
If you ever need a backup of all your pages content for some reason then this is where you can make one.
Merge Pages
If your business ever ends up with more than one Facebook page (which is something I’ve seen happen to companies more than once), instead of just deleting the extra pages you can merge them together.
This combines all the posts from the multiple pages into one single page and more importantly it’ll combine all the Likes from the multiple pages into the one main page.
Delete Page
The final option in the general settings lets you permanently delete you page.
If you ever do decide to delete you page here it’ll immediately removed and no one will be able to find it. You then have 14 days during which you can choose to restore the page if you decide deleting it was a mistake.
After the 14 days you’ll be asked to confirm that you want the page permanently deleted or just unpublished.
Messaging Settings
You have a few options here for handling your pages private messages.
Use the Return key to send messages
I hate this option and it’s turned off by default now thankfully. When this is turned on and you’re typing a message hitting the Return or Enter key on your keyboard will send the message.
I like breaking my messages up into easy to read paragraphs so having this turned on drives me crazy.
Response Assistant
If you have someone managing your page full time who’s there to respond to messages you can enable an away message. If it’s outside your business hours or the person managing your page is on vacation anyone who messages your page will receive the message you type here which will most likely say you’re away and will get back to them soon.
Send Instant Replies to anyone who messages your Page
The screenshot above is from my page and I have a message that’s set to automatically go out to anyone who messages my page instructing them to contact me through my website’s contact page instead since I don’t check my Facebook messages very often.
If you want to send out some kind of automatic “thank you for contacting us” message this is where you do it.
Show a Messenger Greeting
If you set a greeting here anyone who uses the Facebook Messenger app will get a specific greeting the first time they start a conversation with your page.
Post Attribution
Here you can decide if you want your posts on the page to say they’re from the page itself or from you as a Facebook user.
If you have multiple people posting things to your page and they all have their own unique personalities then you might want to set this to post as the user.
If it’s just you though and you want your posts to say they’re from “your business” then you want your posts to come from the page, not you as a user.
Notification Settings
These settings are pretty self explanatory and they control what kinds of notifications your page sends you.
You can set this to receive notifications on Facebook itself for things like page mentions or new comments. You can also select whether or not you want to receive email notifications or even text message notifications if you’ve entered your cell phone number.
Page Roles
This is a pretty important section and is where you can add or remove page administrators.
Right now you probably only have one admin and that should be the business account you created before making your page.
If you also want to manage this page from your personal Facebook account or have your employees post things you can add them here too.
There are different levels of access here as well so if you have employees posting to your page you don’t have to give them full access.
To add a user as an administrator of the page first they need to like the page with their Facebook account. Then on this screen you enter their name or the email address of their Facebook account to add them as an admin.
For some reason I can never get it to work by entering their name so I always have to ask them what the email address of their Facebook account is and then that seems to work for me.
You have 5 different roles that you can assign with different levels of access to your page.
Admin:?Admins can control everything about your page. Make sure you have one admin made with your company social media account that you have full control over. No matter what happens you’ll always be able to remove other users if anything goes horribly wrong.
Editor: if you have employees posting to your page then you probably want to set them up as Editors. Editors can post as the page, view messages, create ads and do pretty much whatever you need. They can assign roles to users but they’ll never be able to touch admins.
Moderator: Moderators can’t make posts but they can send and respond to messages and comments as well as delete comments.
Advertiser: these users only have control over Facebook ads. If you ever decide to outsource your Facebook advertising to some sort of social media company or VA then you would set them up as an Advertiser.
Analyst: if you ever have some sort of consultant come in and they need to view your page analytics because they’re going to supposedly make things better then you set them up as an Analyst and they can only see your page stats, they can’t post or anything like that.
People and Other Pages
This section gives you a giant list of all the people and other pages that have liked your page.
From this list you can ban people from your page if you need to as well as view a list of everyone that you’ve previously banned.
You might not see every single person that has liked your page, only the people who have publicly liked your page. If their privacy settings are really high they won’t show up in the list.
You can still ban people like this though it you need to directly from the comments they leave on your page.
Preferred Page Audience
You most likely set this up when you first created the page but you can set your ideal page audience or update it here. Based on the audience you define Facebook’s algorithm will attempt to show your posts more to people in this audience.
Apps
If you install any Facebook apps they’ll appear here with their own settings. By default you don’t have any apps installed and you don’t really need to install any unless you want to.
Facebook apps add additional features to your page like the ability to run contests, capture email addresses and much more.
Instagram Ads
If you have an Instagram account you can connect it with your Facebook account and then run ads on Instagram using the Facebook ad manager. You probably never need to worry about this and can ignore it.
Featured
If you like pages as your page you can feature them in a box on your own page. Up to five pages are shown at a time and you can select which ones?will be rotated in the featured section.
You can also?feature page owners on the side of your page.?If you want the other employees in your company to have their smiling faces featured on your page you can also feature Facebook users as page owners. They just have to?be administrators of the page.
Page Support
Here is where you can check the status of any tickets you have with Facebook support. Facebook’s support is not great and unless you’re a giant company like Coca Cola or McDonalds that spends a huge amount of money on Facebook advertising I probably wouldn’t bother trying to get support from them.
Activity Log
The final option in the settings is the Activity Log where you can find a chronological list of everything that has been posted on your page and any other activities your page might have done. It’s a little bit easier to read then going through the timeline itself.
Using Facebook as Your Page
When you log into Facebook anything you do will be done by the user you’re logged in as, not your Facebook page. If you ever want to like other pages or comment on other pages as your business page then you have to Use Facebook as Your Page.
There used to be a specific option for this which would automatically sort of log you in on Facebook as your page so that anything you did would be as that page but they recently removed this option.
Now whenever you see a post that you want to like or comment on as your page you can do it from the post itself regardless of who you’re logged into Facebook as.
In the bottom right corner of any Facebook post you’ll see a tiny profile picture of the user you’re logged in as. If you click on this picture you’ll see a list of the pages you’re an administrator of.
You can then select a page and your comment or like will be made as the page itself and not you as a user.
Responding to Facebook Messages as Your Page
In the menu at the top of your page you have an option called Messages. Clicking this will take you to a section where you can manage all the messages your page receives.
This section functions much the same way as an email inbox. Different conversations will be listed in the Inbox on the left and the conversation itself will be on the right. Here’s an example conversation:
On the left you can see there’s one conversation in the Inbox.
The middle section is the conversation itself. You’ll notice that my automatic reply was automatically sent out after they sent their message. I then added a quick reply back and you’ll see how the messages play out much like text messages.
On the right you have a few extra options. The About section at the top will have information about the person messaging you if they have public information available.
Below that you can add labels to the conversation. You already have a red “Important” label and an orange “Follow Up” label and you can also add your own and choose from a couple of colours.
Below that you can add notes which is excellent if you have multiple people managing your Facebook page and multiple people are possibly following up with the same conversation.
The paper clip icon at the bottom right lets you attach files, the smiley face icon lets you use stickers which are basically collections of emoticons and the speech bubble lets you choose from a selection of pre-written replies, you can save your own if you want too.
The weird sort of broken circle icon near the lower left will let you download a Messenger Code. This messenger code is a circular sort of code that people can scan with the Facebook Messenger app on their smart phone to start a conversation with you.
My Messenger Code looks like this:
It’ll incorporate your profile picture into the centre of the code.
To scan the code open the Facebook Messenger app on your smart phone, tap on People in the menu at the bottom and then on the first option, Scan Code.
Page Notifications
The next option in the menu at the top of your page is for your Notifications. Every time you get a like, a comment, or whatever a notification will appear here, separate from your regular Facebook user notifications.
When you first create a page and you have very few followers and very little activity you’ll receive regular Facebook notifications to make you feel good I guess. Once you start getting more fans and activity on your page you’ll stop getting the notifications on your regular Facebook account.
The main notifications page will have all of your notifications showing but you can choose to view just your likes, comments, shares or other notifications.
When you view a notification it’s supposed to be marked as read and you can also check them all and click the Mark All as Read button. For some reason I can never seem to mark all my notifications as read so on some of the pages I manage I have a huge amount of notifications all the time and I pretty much just ignore this section.
If you click on Activity?in the menu on the left you can see how many people mentioned your page as well as how many people shared your posts on their own timelines and pages.
The last option in the menu on the left, Requests, keeps a list of all the information requests people send your page. These are things like requests for your address or contact information if someone wants it.
I’ve never received a request like this ever on any of the pages I’ve managed so you’ll probably never need to worry about this.
Insights
The next item in the menu at the top of your page is Insights. This section gives you ton of information and analytics about your page.
Because there’s so much information here I’m going to be covering Facebook Insights in a future post.
Publishing Tools
The final item in the menu at the top of your page is Publishing Tools.
When you click here it’ll open a section with all your recently published posts.
It’ll also show you some basic analytics such as reach (the number of people who saw your post) and the number of likes and comments.
Scheduled Posts and Drafts
In the menu on the left the next item is Scheduled Posts, this is where you can see a list of all the posts you’ve made that are scheduled for the future.
You don’t have to post when you’re on Facebook, you can schedule the post to appear later which is great for making holiday themed posts. If you’ve found that most of your audience is on Facebook during a certain time period you can also schedule your posts to go out then.
If you ever want to schedule a post for the future click on the little down arrow beside the blue publish button and select Schedule.
After clicking on schedule button you’ll get a pop-up with a calendar to select the date and time you’d like the post to go out.
If you want you can also select a date and time when the post will stop showing up in people’s news feeds, that’s what the Stop News Feed Distribution option does.
In the same drop down menu with the Schedule option you can also Backdate a post which will post it to your time line but with a date in the past that you select.
You can also save the post as a draft and come back to it later in the Drafts section.
Expiring Posts
The Expiring Posts option in the left menu under Publishing Tools shows a list of all the posts that are set to expire.
When you post a video (and only when you post a video for some reason) and click on schedule you get an additional option to set an expiration date when the video will be removed from your page’s timeline.
When the post expires you can select the option to delete it completely as well as any analytics or just have it removed from your timeline. It’ll still show up in other places if other people have shared it by default.
Videos
The Videos?section under Publishing Tools contains a library of all the videos you’ve uploaded to your page and an option to ?make live videos using “professional video equipment”. For the live videos Facebook explicitly says it’s not for creating live videos using your webcam.
I probably wouldn’t bother running a live stream through Facebook, plus I’ve never even heard of anyone doing that before. Google Hangouts or Skype are probably better options if you want to run a live stream. You can always post a link to the stream on your Facebook page anyways.
Lead Ads Forms
This is another section you’ll probably never need to worry about. Here you can create lead generating ads that generate leads directly from Facebook itself instead of by sending people to a lead capture form on your website.
I will be covering all the various forms of Facebook advertising in a future post.
Making Posts on Your Page
At the top of your timeline is a small box where you can make posts to your page.
If you click in the box that says “Write something…” this section expands to give you a few more options.
By default it’s set to let you write a Status which is a simple text post.
If you paste a link to a website or a post on a website Facebook will try to pull information from the page such as an image, title and description.
Facebook will try to pull an image from the page as well as the the meta title and description. If you’ve properly filled in the Facebook Open Graph meta data then it’ll display the image, description and title you entered there.
When you paste a link into the create a post box it’ll take a few seconds for Facebook to pull this information. Once the information has been retrieved you can delete that URL and instead type whatever you want, usually something like “check out this awesome post about whatever” or something like that to try to encourage people to click through.
Photo and Video Posts
If you click on Photo/Video instead of Status you’ll get the following options:
Upload Photos/Video will let you create a post much like the link post with a short description you type followed by the photos or video.
Creating a Photo Album
Create a Photo Album lets you upload a group of photos and create an album.
You can enter a title and description for the album as well as a location where the photos were taken if you want.
By default Facebook will compress the images somewhat but if you check the High Quality checkbox it’ll use a higher quality larger file for the images which will load a bit slower.
The Hide from News Feed check box will create the album but it won’t post about it on anyone’s news feeds.
The album will try to pull a date from the meta data in the photos if you click on Use date from photos, otherwise you can click on Pick a date and select your own date for the album.
You also have a few options for each individual photo in your album.
The two arrows in the upper left let you rotate the image, the X icon in the upper right will let you delete the photo from the album.
Below where it says “Say something about this photo…” you can enter a description. You can also click anywhere on the photo to tag someone.
The gear icon in the bottom right has the option to edit the location of the?photo, change the date of the photo and make the photo the cover photo for the album.
When you’re ready click on the blue Post button and the album will be posted to your page.
There will be a post on your timeline about the album and you can access the album directly by going to the Photos tab of your page and clicking on albums.
I personally don’t usually bother making albums of photos. Most people that interact with your page do so through your posts as they appear in their news feeds. Most people aren’t coming to your page and browsing through your albums.
Therefore I usually just post pictures one at a time directly to my timeline and I don’t usually bother trying to keep things organized into albums.
If you do decide to organize your photos into albums and post photos one at a time to the albums they will show up on your timeline one at a time as if you posted them directly to your time line.
It’s up to you how organized you want to get with your Facebook page.
Creating a Photo Carousel
The next photo/video option you have is to Create a Photo Carousel.
When you create a Photo Carousel the first thing it asks you for is a URL. Facebook will then try to pull a series of photos from that URL to create the carousel.
Here I entered the URL for the recommended books page on my site and you’ll see it pulled a bunch of the book cover photos.
When you publish the post you’ll end up with a photo carousel where you can move left and right to see different photos. The last photo will be a link to the site saying see more at your URL.
Create a Slideshow
Your final photo/video option is to create a slideshow from several photos that you upload. Here I’ve uploaded some random stock photos.
It’ll show each photo for 2 seconds and you can drag the photos to re-order them.
When you’re ready hit the publish button. Facebook will then take a little bit of time to process the video and will send you a notification when it’s ready.
The result is a simple video slideshow.
Events, Milestones and Notes
The last option you have when making a new post is Event, Milestone +. Clicking on this gives you three options to create an event, a milestone or a note.
Events
Clicking on Event will bring up a section where you can create a Facebook Event.
The first option you have is to upload a photo for the event. If possible try to upload a 1920 x 1080 pixel image. If that’s not possible or you’re not sure how to do that try to upload the largest image you can and you’ll be able to reposition it a bit later.
The information it asks for here is pretty self explanatory. For the location you can type in a place or address and if that location is in Facebook’s database you can simply select it from their suggestions.
For co-hosts you can type individual people or Facebook pages. You can also enter a website where people can go to buy tickets if your event has tickets. This can be your site or a third party ticket site.
You can also enter tags which will make it easier for other people to find your event and for Facebook’s algorithm to recommend the event to other people.
Facebook also has a link to a pdf with some best practices for create events at the bottom of the window.
When you’re done filling in your information hit publish and your event will be published.
Events on Facebook get their own little page where you can post updates and people can make comments.
People can select at the top if they’re Interested, Going to the Event or Not Going. Once they decide that they’re interested or select that they’re going they’ll be able to leave comments in the discussion section of the event.
In the Invite drop down you have the options to invite friends to the event, share the event on your timeline or share the event on a page.
The Edit button lets you edit the information of the event.
The icon with the three dots gives you a few more options such as managing scheduled posts for the event, promoting the event or promoting ticket sales using Facebook ads. You can also create a QR code that you can put in your event posters or advertising that will take people to the event page on Facebook when it’s scanned.
Milestones
Milestones let you add sort of important dates to your Facebook page, these are things like the date your company was founded or anything you feel is monumental.
Here you enter the title of the milestone, the location, the date and a story about the milestone. You can also upload a photo for the milestone as well if you want.
If you select Hide from News Feed the milestone won’t show up in your followers’ news feeds. It’ll still be completely visible on your page time line though.
When you hit save the milestone will show up as a post in your timeline that people can like or leave comments on.
Notes
Notes are essentially large text posts, almost like blog posts that you can make on your page.
Selecting Notes will open the Note Editor which is a basic text editor where you can type your note.
You can add a cover photo at the top if you want and if you mouse over the little photo icon to the left of where you type your note you can insert photos.
If you mouse over the icon with the three lines you’ll get a few options for formatting your text.
H1 is a large heading while H2 is a slightly smaller heading. Then you have a bullet list and an ordered list followed by a block quote and the last icon with the 2 brackets is so you can enter code into your note and not have it mess up anything.
When you’re done and you publish your note it’ll show up on your timeline.
I just made a quick example note with dummy text. Clicking on the See More link will open?a very pretty looking full version of the note.
While the note editor is really nice if you’re going to make giant posts like this I would much prefer that you make them on your own website which you have full control over.
A Few More Post Options
There are a few more options at the bottom of the post editor.
The camera icon on the bottom left simply lets you upload photos to include with your post.
The face icon lets you include how you’re feeling at the time of your post. You can choose things like what you’re feeling, watching, listening to, playing and various other silly things.
The pin icon lets you check in. If you’re in a specific location and you want all your followers to know where you are this icon will tag your post with a location.
The clock icon lets you select a date and time for your post in the past. This option won’t let you schedule your post for the future, it’ll just let you back date it and the post will appear further back on your time line.
The target icon lets you define an audience for your post which we covered earlier. This will only be available if you enable the option in your page settings.
Write post in another language lets you make multiple versions of your post in multiple languages. This option is only available if you turn it on in your page settings and is covered earlier in this post.
Finally the Boost Post icon will let you spend money to have more people see your post. I’ll cover this and a lot more about Facebook advertising in a future post.
Post Analytics
When you make a post on your Facebook page there will be some information at the bottom of the post about the number of likes, shares and what not.
This is from a post on one of my other Facebook pages that has a bunch more followers.
If you click on the X people reached link it’ll open a Post Details window that looks like this:
The number of people reached is how many people saw your post. Below that is the number of reactions, comments and shares.
The left most column is the total number of reactions, comments and shares the post received.
The middle column is the amount of reactions, comments and shares the post itself as it appeared on your Facebook page received.
The last column shows the number of reactions, comments and shares the post receive after it was shared by someone else on their own timeline.
If someone likes your post and they share it on their timeline then all their friends have a chance of seeing the post as well.
The Post Clicks number is the total number of clicks?the post received. Link Clicks are how many people clicked on the link in your post and went on to your website. Other clicks is the amount of clicks on things like the title or a “see more” link that the post received.
The last section shows how many people hid the post, hid all your posts, reported your post as spam and unliked your?page. If you’re getting a lot of negative feedback here that’s not a good sign.
If you click on the X Shares at the bottom of the post you can see the posts people made where they shared your post, what they said about it and how other people reacted and commented on it.
This post received 24 shares but if I click there I only see 3 shares. The actual shares you’ll see here is dependant on people’s privacy settings so if their settings are too high you won’t see how they shared your post.
Inviting People to Like Your Page
If we take a look at the information at the bottom of the post again:
You’ll see the Like thumbs up, wow and heart icons which shows the number of reactions the post received. In this case two people who’s names I’ve blurred out and 184 other people reacted to the post.
If you click on this link it’ll open an “invite to like page” window.
Here you’ll see a list of everyone who reacted to your post. You’ll notice that most of them have a sort of greyed out “Liked” button but two of them here, number 5 and 7 have an “Invite” button.
The people who have the “Liked” button have already liked your page. The people with the “Invite” button don’t currently like your page. They most likely had a friend who shared the post and then they posted their reaction on the shared post their friend made.
Because they liked that post there’s a pretty good chance that they’d like to see more posts by your page so you can click on Invite which will send them an invitation to like your page. All you have to do is click the Invite button and that’s it.
The gear icon with the down arrow has only one option which is to ban the person from your page. You’ll probably never need to ban someone, especially from this screen.
How does Facebook Decide Who Sees Your Posts?
In the early days of Facebook if you followed a person or a business you would see all of their posts. Then Facebook introduced an algorithm that was supposed to show you more of the posts you were interested in and less of the ones you weren’t.
This is a pretty common thing that eventually happens to social networks. Instagram just rolled out a new algorithm that’s supposed to prioritize posts instead of showing everything in chronological order and Twitter is also starting to experiment with this as well.
Facebook (and other networks that bring in algorithms) all say the same thing, that they want to show you quality and revenant content that you’re going to be interested in.
There are two main reasons for this. The first one is that if they show you posts that you’re interested in rather than a bunch of boring things you don’t care about then you’re going to come back to Facebook more and more which means you’ll see the advertising on Facebook more and more.
The second and major reason of course is that by restricting how many people see your posts they’re trying to encourage you to pay money to boost your posts to reach more people. If you don’t pay to boost your post an extremely small amount of your followers (around 5%) will see your posts.
There are lots of factors that go into how Facebook decides who to show your posts to and no one except the people inside Facebook know for sure how their algorithm works. That being said Facebook has explained some things and through trial and error (much like with SEO) people have figured out some things that affect the algorithm.
The major thing you probably want to be concerned with is the quality of your posts. The simplest way to look at this is by how many likes, reactions, comments and shares your posts get. The more engagement with your post then the more chance people will see it, either your followers in their news feeds or friends of your followers who are seeing their friends react to your posts in their news feeds.
This is why it’s important to build a following of people who care about your content. You can go onto a site like Fiverr and buy 1,000 Facebook page likes for $5 but that’s going to affect you negatively. All these users who like your page are most likely not real or from small countries in the developing world. None of them care about what you have to say.
When you make a post and none of your 1,000 fake followers react to it that sends a sign to Facebook that the quality level of that post is probably not great and it’ll show future posts to less and less people.
There are also user based settings that are different for every user that affect what they see in their news feeds.
For example, if a user comments and likes mostly photos and never watches or engages with videos then over time Facebook’s algorithm will learn to show them less video posts and more photo posts.
There’s also the setting that a user can select to always see your posts at the top of their news feed. I mentioned this option earlier in this post and most users have no idea this option even exists.
Do your best to encourage your followers to select the “See First” option.
Facebook has also added in options where users can instruct the site that they’d like to see more or less of certain kinds of content.
By clicking that little down arrow in the upper right of posts you can get some options like seeing less of this kind of post, unfollowing the person completely or hiding all posts from a page.
Finally the amount of time a user spends looking or engaging with a post the more likely they’ll see more posts like that and more people will see that post. If a user just scrolls past a post without caring that’s another sign that the post is low quality.
Getting More Engagement with Your Posts
There are lots of little tricks you can do to get more engagement and ultimately more people seeing your posts. I’m going to be covering this in more detail in a future post along with examples of good and bad posts but here are some quick tips.
1) Post Quality Content
You have to remember that you’re not just competing with other business for attention in people’s news feeds, you’re competing with their friends and family members too.
Therefore you have to make sure what you post is good and people will actually be interested in it. Nobody cares if you’re posting something like a $5 off special for an oil change.
2) Include a Call to Action
Giving people instructions is a very easy way to increase post engagement. Just adding in something simple like “like if you agree!” can go a huge way to getting people to engage with your posts.
3) Figure Out the Best Time to Post
About 75% of the engagement with your post happens in the first 2-3 hours and then that post will most likely be buried and no one will see it again.
By looking at your analytics and through a bit of trial and error try to figure out the best times when most of your followers are on Facebook and reacting to your posts.
4) Use Really Good, Eye-Catching Photos
Using a big eye catching photo definitely helps get attention to your post when people are scrolling through their news feed and greatly increases the chance that they’ll stop for a second to look at your post.
In Conclusion
Hopefully this gives you a solid understanding of how to create a Facebook page and how to use the social network to promote your business.
I will be following up this post with 3 more posts on topics like Facebook Advertising, Facebook Analytics and how to make a quality Facebook post with good and bad examples.
In the mean time if there’s anything you’re unclear about or you have any questions about Facebook let me know in the comments.
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