Transcription
Hey, welcome to the channel! My name is Mike, and in this video, I'll be showing you how to set up a professional Facebook business page. This is something that absolutely everybody on the internet really needs to have—businesses, fundraisers, whatever you're doing.
Yet, I'm always surprised by how many people out there either don't have a Facebook business page—I'll explain why you need that in a second—or they have one, but they don't have it fully set up and are missing some of the key things I'll be showing you throughout this video.
So, kind of going back to what I said about why everybody needs it, especially beginners, when you're just getting started with a business, is if you make a website, eventually you want that to rank number one, right? If you look up CNN, CNN's website is going to show up on Google. But if you look up your brand new website, it's very likely you won't be ranking right away because Google doesn't trust you. They don't know you; they want to trust you.
Google treats new websites with a little bit of skepticism. However, what they treat with much less skepticism are Facebook pages because Facebook is a vetted platform that Google knows about. So, you are much more likely to rank higher on Google with your Facebook business page early on than your actual website. That's just one of the many reasons that you want to build up this presence.
A second reason is that even once your website starts to rank, you can own the number one and the number two position when your Facebook business page ranks on Google as well. And then the third advantage, of course, is that social network access to millions and millions of users every single day on Facebook.
So, with that being said, let's get into how you would actually get started with this.
All right, so starting off, we're going to go over to facebook.com. You want to get started by signing into your personal account, or if you don't have a personal account, make a personal account. I know at first you might think you'd want to make a new business account that's not associated with your personal account, but the way Facebook is set up is you really need to start off with this tied to your personal account. Eventually, we can remove it and make it its own separate entity, but that's the way it works for the beginning.
So, sign into your regular Facebook account, and then on the top right, you'll see a little nine-dot grid—it's called the menu. If you click on that, you can see "Create" and a whole column of items here. We're going to click on "Page," and that'll bring you into this blank page builder.
So, we're going to start off by inputting this information: the page name, the category, and the bio. Let's say I have a local coffee shop. I'm just going to name this "Mike's Local Coffee." Just pretend that's what the business name is.
Then, the category—you want to find something as specific as possible. So, I'm going to start off with "Coffee Shop." Sure enough, that is something that does exist, and you can have multiple categories if it's really tough to describe what it is. For me, the first one makes perfect sense, so I'm just going to keep that one.
Now, I'm going to have a little bio here. This is optional, but I highly recommend you add this. Now we can click on "Create Page."
So now, for the next step, they want to know a little bit more about your business, including the phone number, email, location, and your hours. If you're an online business, obviously no hours are available, but for me, I'm going to say "Open at select hours," being a coffee shop. That makes sense.
Something to note is you can have multiple open windows throughout the day. If you click the plus, you can have, you know, maybe you're open in the morning, close for lunch, and then open again in the evening. That's something you can easily add.
Now, as far as the website goes, don't worry about how to make a website right now. After this video, we have full tutorials on that as well. I'm just going to put in my website for now. We'll enter a phone number, and we can click on "Next."
Now we're going to add a cover photo and a profile photo. The cover photo is obviously the big rectangle in the background. Let's start off with a profile photo. Now, I have this little logo right here I made from a previous tutorial—slightly different name; I called it "Lunar Coffee." Okay, we'll just keep that logo for now; you get the idea.
Now we need something in the background. I think this one—maybe some coffee beans would be good. No, let's go with this one right here. There we go! Going to add that photo for my—yeah, there we go. We can reposition this; we can drag it to reposition.
One thing people often miss is this blue button right here: "Add an Action Button." This is very, very important. The whole purpose of having this billboard on the Internet is to direct traffic in some way. Maybe you're looking for calls, maybe you're looking for leads that click through something, maybe you're looking for people to schedule—whatever it might be, you want to make sure that action button is reflecting that.
So when people land here and they're like, "You know what? I really like this," they're going to convert and actually become a customer. So, I'm going to add an action button. We'll say "Start Order."
You have a lot of different options here. It could be "Get Tickets" if you're like a band, for example. You could be "Sign Up" if you have a newsletter. For a coffee shop here, I'm just going to say "Start Order." We can add a website link for starting the order.
Now, this is where you'd maybe set up something with GrubHub or DoorDash or whatever. But for me, I don't actually have a real coffee shop, so I'm just going to put in my website again. You can actually order there, but we'll just test the link out, and I'll show you how that actually works in a second.
So now, let's say "Next," and you can see on the right side this is really starting to come together. It's starting to look a lot better now. It says you can connect WhatsApp to your page. I'm not going to be using WhatsApp on here, so I'm going to skip this.
But again, if you have that for customer support or if you're in a region that uses WhatsApp a lot, then go ahead and do that. Here in the United States, it's much less common; for some reason, people don't really use it as much.
Now we can build your audience by inviting friends, and then you can choose if you want to have emails and notifications. I'm going to leave both of those off for the time being.
Then it looks like you're done, and this is where a lot of people do stop. But this is absolutely the wrong place to stop because we are far from being done with this Facebook business page.
So you'll land on this page right here. A couple of things you want to know: one, on the top, if you click on that, you can switch between this account and your personal profile, and it will act as two different things.
So if you want to go and interact with different posts and profiles and things like that as "Mike's Local Coffee" or whatever your business is, you can do that just by clicking on "Home" right there. You can go and interact with things; you can post, of course, and if I want to comment, it'll show up as coming from my business.
So let's go back to "Mike's Local Coffee." If we click on the shop there, I want to actually customize a lot more about this. We want to customize some of the settings here.
Now, the first thing I want to do is choose what sections are actually appearing here. By default, it's going to show up looking just like this. You've got reviews there, you have followers, photos, and things like that. But maybe that doesn't make sense for me.
So if I click on "More," you can scroll down and say "Manage Sections." We can choose which sections are going to be shown. We don't need music here; we don't need check-ins; we don't need sports, movies, TVs—like, we don't need any of this stuff because that doesn't really make sense for "Mike's Local Coffee."
Additionally, reviews given—if I'm reviewing other places accidentally with this account, I definitely don't want that to be tied to my business. I don't want people to be seeing that very easily, so I'm going to save, and that gets rid of a lot of the stuff that we didn't actually need.
Like I said, we didn't need music on here, but these are going to be there for anyone who is visiting. I'm going to close that.
This little box right here that says "How healthy is your page?" You want to notice right here you have some other things you can add. You can add something that is featured; you can add details; you can add hobbies. Hobbies doesn't really make sense for this unless you're trying to be cute and funny—in which case, go for it. You can add that.
But let's go and add "Featured." If we add "Featured," you can add featured photos here, and that's going to be a great way to showcase maybe some of your best menu items or some of the best photos of your business that aren't just the most recent ones posted.
So if I go click on "Add New," we can upload some new photos here. I just uploaded three photos. I'm going to say "Next," and we can title this "Signature Drinks." We can choose which of these is the cover photo. I'm just going to go with maybe this one right here as a cover photo—"Signature Drinks" little collection there.
Those are the three that we have, so I'm going to say "Save." You can also click on "Edit Details" and choose what is and is not showing. For example, I just removed my phone number so you guys don't have to keep blurring it, so you don't see it. But I still have everything else right there.
Okay, so this next step is not going to apply to everyone, but I think it probably could apply to most people out there, and this is adding a menu. Even if you don't have food items, maybe the menu could be the services you offer or something like that.
So in order to add a menu on here, we can click on "Manage" on the left side. You can scroll down to "Menu," and we can add a menu tab to our page. This makes a lot of sense for a coffee shop, of course, but like I said, you could also add this to really any other style of business, and this could just be like what services you actually offer and the prices associated with them.
So we can start off with a photo of our menu. I'm just going to upload, I think, this one right here. Now we can choose if we have customer pickup—yes, we do have customer pickup. We have dining—maybe we have delivery as well. We can add all three of those there.
Then something really cool is you can have a range for delivery. You could say anything within like 10 miles, we're good to do. Minimum order—not going to deliver like a 50-cent creamer, right? You probably want to get something a little more expensive. You can say minimum order could be like $15, and a delivery fee could vary by distance. You could have maybe $5 for every mile—I don't know, something like that—and that could be calculated when somebody actually calls to order something.
Now, as far as payment methods go, we can just keep adding the ones that we do accept. So we accept cash, obviously, credit cards, maybe Discover, and you can just keep adding all of these. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to accept them through Facebook, of course; it just means that anyone who's looking at this knows that when they come to your restaurant or your business, they'll be able to pay with those.
Now I can say "Save," and it's important to note on the right side that we have two ways to look at this. We've got our desktop view, and we have our mobile view. So if I—sorry, if I get back to that editor—if I click on "Edit" again, we can click on the mobile view. This is what it looks like. Desktop view looks like that—not that different.
But I'm going to say "Save," and it'll bring us back to this space right here. Now, also note you can have multiple pages of your menu, just adding more photos there—easy way to do that. But otherwise, if I say "Cancel," a really cool feature that we have here is that once you have your menu created, you can have a QR code.
It's easy to print out on stickers, put them on the tables, and then people can just view your menu on Facebook. The advantage of doing that is when somebody scans the menu, they're on your Facebook page looking at your menu, and it makes it really easy for them to just like the restaurant or leave a review right there on your Facebook page.
So the QR code, if you just click on "View QR Code" right here, that's what it's going to look like. You can download it; you can print it out. You can display it anywhere in your restaurant, or you could have it usually displayed as well, like on a TV or something like that.
So let's go back to where we were. Now, let's go back to our page. We can click on the Facebook icon on the top left and then just click on "Mike's Local Coffee" or whatever the name of your business is.
So now we have a menu. Now, from our Facebook page, we can click on the "Edit" button, and there are a couple of things we can change here. Most of this was set up in the very beginning, of course—the profile photo, the cover photo, the bio, as well as our information.
But if we click on "Edit Your About Info," you can scroll down, and you can add social links as well. So if you've got an Instagram, you have a Twitter, you've got TikTok—whatever—you can add links right here. So I'm going to add one right now.
So we're going to add a social link, and this is going to be on Instagram. So "Mike O'Brien," we can save that, and now we have that added there. We can add more social links if you wanted other ones.
But going down, you can add diversity info; you can add Wi-Fi network name—again, makes perfect sense for a coffee shop. So we can just make our Wi-Fi name and then we can have a Wi-Fi password. You can say maybe it's "Free with Purchase." We just put that in right there, and we can say "Save."
We can add our price range. This is going to be in dollar signs, so maybe I have—maybe it's like a moderate, like maybe $2 sign coffee shop. It's not super cheap, not quite like Dunkin', but it's not like a Starbucks or something even more expensive than that.
All right, this is coming along pretty nicely. In the "About" section, we've got a couple of other things we can add here, one being the privacy and the legal info. I mean, if you require a privacy policy, consult your attorney, then you can add that right here.
The next, I don't know, five things down here, six things—these don't really apply as much to most businesses, so I usually just leave those blank as they are.
So like I said, we're making a lot of progress here. Let's take a look at what this would actually look like to an end user—not us, of course; they're not going to see this dashboard that says "Promote" and a bunch of other stuff.
So if we click on the three dots on the right side, you can go down to "View As" right there. "View As," and you can just view it as somebody else who's looking at your page. So it's going to look like this. You'll see, like I said, all of our tabs are right there—videos, live, following—that's all there on the left side.
The social link—that'll bring them over to Instagram. It tells you everything about where it is, offers free Wi-Fi with purchase. They're getting information about you, and then we have our signature drinks, like I said, showcased right there.
All right, so our page is looking pretty good, but you have to admit it's looking pretty empty. We don't have enough photos; we don't have enough information. The more information you have, the more active your account looks to people, the more likely they are to engage with it, and again, more likely to actually go there.
So we want to add some posts here. We're going to exit the "View As" on the top, and you can see this little option here for different ways we can post. We can put a photo or video out; we can have a live video if you're streaming. I usually don't do that, actually, ever.
Then we have Reels. Now, Reels are going to be much more browsable. That's more of like a short little—it could be comedy; it could be really anything—a how-to, something like that is a great way to gain a lot of exposure, but it's not always going to be the most local exposure.
So that's something that can be very beneficial for some styles of pages, but not all pages out there. If we just click on "What's on Your Mind," we can start off with any kind of post. It could just be a text post. We can change the background of that just like you're used to on Facebook.
But what I like to do when I'm making a post on Facebook is use a tool called Canva. Canva has paid versions, but there's also a free version as well, which really does allow you to make quite a bit.
So if we just go to canva.com, I have Canva Pro, so it might look slightly different than what you have. But I'm going to type in "Facebook Post for Coffee Shop," and I'm going to hit enter and search for what kind of templates we have that actually make the most sense.
Magic design is going to be, I believe, AI-based, but we can go down and say, "Hey, this looks good right here. Maybe that's the discount I'm looking for." "International Coffee Day"—that's not too bad. Let's go with this one right here.
Let's just say this—we can customize this template. So click on "Customize Template," and now we can add our logo up here. We can say "Mike's Coffee Shop." Canva is super easy to use. You just click on any one of these, move them around, edit them, change the text, the pictures, and we have a lot of stuff we can add on the left side.
If you click on "Elements," there, again, as you can see, tons and tons of different things you can just look for, like "Coffee." Anything with coffee, and you've got all these different things we can add. Any little element can be added over there, and you can customize them very easily.
Now, I'm just going to click on "Share" just as it is. I don't think we need to go into a full Canva tutorial here. Mostly, I just want to show you how you can post on Facebook. So let's leave this as is, let's download it, and now from here, I'm going to add a photo.
We're going to upload the photo that I just made, which is—where is it?—there. Now we can post that. And by the way, this recognized that it was an event since I said "Coming in on Monday."
You can simply make an event if you want and invite people, and they can choose if they're coming or not—just one of the many tools we have available. I'm not going to make this as an event; I'm just going to make it as a standard post just to kind of populate the page a little bit more.
Now, let's add another photo just to kind of get a little bit more on here. I recommend having at least five to six posts in the very beginning. Should be pretty easy to do, and then you're going to want to keep up with this, making one post—depending on your business, I would say at the very least one a month, maybe one every other month.
But you want to make sure it looks like you're still active on this page. If I go to a Facebook business page and the most recent post is like four years ago, it's usually not the best look.
Now, one of the most important things we can do with a Facebook business page is create a very nice sharable link. This is going to be done through the username. So in order to do that, on the left side, we want to click on "Settings."
When you click on "Settings," you'll see "Username," and you do not have a username set. So if I click on "Edit," I can choose my username. If you don't have this option, you may need to get 100 followers first. Sometimes Facebook requires more followers before they allow you to claim a username.
But the benefit here is that you'll have that nice sharable link, then like I will be facebook.com/Mike'sLocalCoffee. Let's see if that's available. Mike's Local Coffee is available, so I can save changes.
Now, facebook.com/Mike'sLocalCoffee is going to be a link that I can use that goes to my page—very easy, very sharable. People can remember it and find you more easily as well, and across the board, it's going to be better for your business.
There we go! Now we have that. You can print it out; you can also make that into a QR code so people can visit. Maybe if you put it on like your register or your door or wherever, people can scan the link and go to that page just like that.
While we're here, there are a couple of key settings we need to talk about. One of them being privacy. If we click on "Privacy," you can manage who is able to see your posts. So, everybody—that's really what you want as a business, of course.
You can say "Review all the posts you're tagged in." You could require it so that when you're tagged, you get to review it. That way, if there's any kind of smear campaigns or anybody who's very upset with you, you get to see it and address it first before you're tagged in it, and maybe it goes viral, for example.
Then, who can see the people, pages, and lists you follow? Right now, that's everybody. Maybe you don't want that. Maybe I would say, "Hey, like only me." I don't need anybody to see who I am following. Maybe I'm following other local businesses; maybe you have relationships with suppliers. You don't always want that to be public to absolutely everybody, so you can control that right there.
Then, of course, you want to make sure this is enabled: "Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your page?" Absolutely, yes! For a business, I want to be showing up on Google and have the ability for that to actually work.
Then we can choose if we want people and pages to message your page. The only reason I would recommend turning this off is if you decide that you'd rather have customer service or whatever going through a phone number or like WhatsApp or some other platform, and maybe you don't monitor this.
Then definitely turn this off because you don't want people seeing this, being able to message you on your page, and then just never getting a response and thinking that you're a jerk or you ignored them. Otherwise, your business is not really well attended.
So that's when I would recommend turning it off, but we're going to leave it on for this because I think this is something you probably should monitor, and it might be an easier way for people to message you.
Of course, I recommend going through all the rest of these. You can choose if you're blocking users or apps or pages, and you can determine other privacy settings down here.
But let's go back to "Settings." Now we have "New Pages Experience," and from here, you can choose who has access to your page. If you have a team of people and you want to add other people on here, you can add new access. You could also add people with different levels of access.
For example, you can have community managers that can moderate chats or comments, or they could suspend or remove people that are really violating the community standards, and all of that can be done right here.
So we're going to skip the next couple of these and go back to "Settings." If you have an Instagram account, which I also recommend for every business, it makes a lot of sense to link it to your Facebook business page.
In fact, if you want to switch over to an Instagram business page, you really need to have a Facebook business page anyway. So if we go down to "Linked Accounts," you can simply connect your account. You just type in your username and your password; it'll link over, and it's really honestly very easy to do.
If you don't have an Instagram business account, I have a video I'll link down below. You guys can learn how to do that as well, and that's an even shorter video than this one. It's really quite easy to do.
Going back to "Settings," something I recommend for every business—this is like one of the first things I do—is I go to "Notifications" and I choose which of these are going to be on and which ones will be off.
Some notifications are just distractions. You're not going to be focusing on your business as much as you should, and other ones are really important, and they could get flooded and really get buried by the other ones if you're not disabling and muting other notifications that you really don't think you need.
So if we go in here, we can turn off maybe like—we can turn off this one; we can turn off reminders; we can turn off tags. I don't really care when people tag me.
All of this is going to, like I said, improve your efficiency in your business, but also make it easier for you to detect the most important ones. Maybe it's when somebody tags you; maybe it's when you get a new follower; maybe it's a message—something like that. You want to make sure you're actually getting the right notifications and not the other ones.
So let's click on the Facebook icon, and now while our page looks pretty good, we're not quite done yet. I want to click on "Professional Dashboard," and from here, I want to kind of show you a little bit more about what you're able to see here.
First of all, this is going to show you some really nice key insights, like what your post reach is, your engagement, how many new page likes there are. But really, what I want to do is go on down here to "Inbox."
If we click on "Inbox," it'll open in a new tab, and this is going to allow us to set up some automations. If somebody is going to message us on our page using Facebook Messenger, we want to say, like, maybe we want an auto-responder that says, "Hey, thanks for messaging us! We'll get back to you usually within the next couple of hours."
So I can click on "Automations" on the top, and we can create our first automation. Or we could just say maybe right here we can say "Instant Reply." We can say, "So try it." Let's try that, and this one can be something as simple as what's already there, like, "Hey, thanks for contacting us! We've received your message, and we'll get back to you."
That way, they know they're not sending it out to the ether. It's something that you actually do care about, but make sure that, like I said, you will actually respond to this later. Make sure that you do have this at least installed on your phone.
So let's click on—well, first, we're going to enable this. We're going to enable it; we'll use Messenger, of course. When this happens, when they receive a message on the selected platform, we're going to say, "Hi! Thanks for contacting us! We've received your message, and we appreciate you reaching out. We are making a coffee at the moment, but we will get back to you soon."
Now we can save the changes, and that's what it's going to—that's like the first automation there. Additionally, I recommend browsing through the other ones. Maybe like a "Page Not Recommended" one, so if somebody gives you a bad review, you can automatically send them a message and say, "Hey, like, sorry! Is there any way we can make this right?"
Maybe if you make it right, then they'll change their negative review, and you'll have a net positive or net higher rating on your Facebook business page. So that's the automations. You can really go into the weeds on this and make some pretty crazy ones as well—creating your own automations. It's super, super powerful.
But let's go back to that other tab of our Facebook business page. There's so much more you can do with the Facebook business page. I think we pretty much nailed the fundamentals so far, but if you wanted to go a little bit more advanced, you could go to the platform tools here.
Again, just to get back to where we are, if you go back to your Facebook business page, you click on "Manage," and then on the left side, you can scroll down to "Meta Business Suite." This is going to be where you'd want to go if you're running any ads. If you want a Facebook pixel, you'll know what that means when you're ready, and other things like that—the insights, the monetization, things like that on your page can all be done through Meta Business Suite.
I will make another video in the future on how to manage that, so be sure to go down and click that subscribe button. But as far as looking at our Facebook business page, I think we're just about there.
One last check: we'll go to "View As." I think that looks pretty good. We've got our post there; we've got our information on the left; we have our action button on the top. Make sure you're going and testing that link out as well as testing the messaging out, and I think that's a good start to your online presence.
So I wish you the best of luck with your business. If you enjoyed the video, consider liking and subscribing. I'm Mike O'Brien with Santal Media. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next video!