Local businesses have nothing to lose, but a lot to gain from setting up and maintaining a Facebook business page. Doing so can help promote your business and connect with loyal and potential local customers. It can also be a great way to support other local businesses.
It’s important to know why having a Facebook business page for your business trumps using a personal page.
First of all, it violates Facebook’s Terms of Service agreement to create and manage a personal page solely to conduct business. If you violate this agreement, Facebook has the right to either delete your account or convert it to a business page themselves, in which case you would lose past messages and media content from the old page.
With a Facebook business page, once you reach 30+ “likes”, you can see your page’s insights, or measurements of your page’s performance. This means you can actually see how many people your posts are reaching, the demographics of your audience, and how well your audience is responding and engaging to your content. This can help you understand your audience better and help you decide what content your audience really wants to see.
Using a personal page for a professional business makes you look sloppy. Depending on your privacy settings, it’s possible that when potential customers go to your page they’ll see “Do you know this person? To see what they share, send them a friend request”. People who want to know more about your business shouldn’t have to add you as a ‘friend’ to do so. It boils down to this: Your credibility takes a hit when you use a personal page for your business.
Have we convinced you yet? It’s easy (and free) to set up your business page. We’ll walk you through it.
-
Log in to your personal Facebook account. Don’t worry, your personal page will not show up with the new page you are setting up now.
-
Click on the arrow on the far upper right corner of your screen. From the dropdown box that appears, click on Create Page.
-
Click on the Local Business or Place box.
-
Enter your business’ details here, like its name, address and phone number. This information will appear in the About section of your new page.
-
Enter a little bit more information about your business. If you have a business website, be sure to insert the URL. To make it easy for people to find your Facebook page, you can customize your Facebook page URL. This allows people to type “www.facebook.com/[yourbusinessname]” to go to your page.
-
Upload your business’ logo to use as your profile photo. If you don’t have a logo, you can choose an image you own that best represents your business and its services (but you should really think about getting a logo).
-
You can skip this last step of setting up your page. Facebook suggests setting up a payment method to advertise your business, but it’s not necessary at the moment.
You’re all done! See, that wasn’t so hard.
To access this newly create page, all you need to do is log in to your personal Facebook page and click on the arrow in the upper right hand corner (the same arrow you clicked on in Step 2). Under that:, select your business page. You are now posting, liking, and commenting (read: representing) your business.
Your business is now searchable by name on Facebook and users can contact you either through Facebook or via the contact information you listed in step 4. Facebook business pages work very similarly to personal pages, so managing your new business page should feel familiar.
