Marketing your business is no longer simply about getting listed in the local directory and printing a few flyers and posters. In today’s tech-savvy age, you need to reach out to the millions of people in cyberspace and there are numerous FREE ways you can do that. In part 4 or our 10 minute takeaway series, I show you how you can create a FREE Facebook business page and attract customers using this social media tool used by millions. It takes minutes but will give your web presence a huge boost.

Why even have a Facebook business page?

Facebook - it’s just for teenagers and people posting pictures of their kids and pets, isn’t it?

Well no, it’s much more than that. Businesses have been using Facebook to promote themselves and improve their web presence for a while now and it’s viewed as an essential marketing tool. One of the best FREE ways to plug yourself.

You can use your Facebook page to generate backlinks to your website, which will significantly boost your Google search results. Especially if you link to useful content such as informative blog articles.

The more ‘hits’ you get to your website, the more prominent you will be in Google search results which will greatly improve your credibility. So from a technical (SEO) perspective, creating a Facebook page is a no-brainer - even if you’re not actively posting all the time.

From a small business marketing perspective, it’s another place to demonstrate your professional and consistent brand. If you don’t think you’ve got a brand you need to check out this article

Check it out now: What is your brand and what is it saying about you?

Whether you like it or not, your business has a brand, this is just another way of managing it effectively!

Step by step guide to claiming your Facebook Page

Before you start, you’ll need to set up a personal profile on Facebook if you don’t already have one. You can only create a Facebook business page when logged into your personal profile. You therefore become the default administrator but you can add, change and swap page admins at any time, so don’t worry about this for now. Your personal profile won’t be linked with the business page, you’ll just be a page administrator.

Step 1: Get Over To Facebook & Choose The Correct Page Type

First, click on ‘Create Page’ on the left side of the screen.

This takes you through to a selection of six categories:

• Local business or place
• Company, organisation or institution
• Brand or product
• Artist, band or public figure
• Cause or community
• Entertainment

If your business isn’t a “shopfront” we’d suggest selecting a “Company, Organisation or institution” - this is going to be the case in the majority of cases with UK Manufacturing Businesses, and in reality the difference is minimal.

You can change this at a later date if you find a different page type suits your needs, but hey this is a quick start guide, so let’s not get hung up!

Step 2: Fill out your basic business information

Choose your category from the drop-down box and fill in your business name. You will then be taken to a set-up section where you can add a couple of sentences about your business (remember to keep it snappy and not too technical) plus your website address and Facebook URL (this is just the address that people would have to type in to take them directly to your Facebook page from another site).

Step 3: Upload your profile image

This will be your main image at the top of your page that will appear next to any posts you make.

Your profile image should be a square image (Facebook will crop it to a square if not) and at least 180 pixels wide x 180 pixels tall.

You can use www.canva.com to modify images. To increase consistency and save time, you could use the same image as the one used for your Linkedin profile - presuming that you followed our handy guide to setting up a Linkedin page (part 3 in this series).

Step 4: Skip the last 2 steps facebook provides you with

To be honest, these aren’t too important at this stage, just steps on adding Facebook to your favourites and setting up a Facebook ad so save these for another time when you’re bored and looking for stuff to do.

Step 5: Upload a kick ass cover photo

Your page is now ‘live’ and should look something like this

The next thing to do is add an attention-grabbing cover photo to go alongside your profile image. This is your chance to wow first-time visitors to your page, the equivalent of having an eye-catching sign on a shopfront.

Again, you’ll need to be mindful of Facebook image dimensions. For the cover pic, they are 851 x 315 pixels on desktops (these are cropped to 563 x 315px on mobile devices).

Once again, we’d recommend using canva.com for editing photos. If you’re looking for some free images to download from the web, these sites are useful:

www.pexels.com
www.freeimages.com
pixabay.com

Or just type “free stock images” into Google and find a tonne of other websites offering free images!

If it needs editing, just drop it into Canva.com, apply a few filters and it’ll look like a design pro has created your cover photo!

Step 6: Fill out your profile COMPLETELY

You can work your way slowly through the sections on the left hand side of the screen but the most important is the ‘About’ section. Click on this and work your way down, filling in as much information as you can. Make sure the info matches what you’ve written elsewhere otherwise be prepared to be bombarded with messages asking you to clarify what you mean!

Key information is obviously address, operating hours (if you’re not open 24/7) and contact details. You also have the opportunity to give a more in-depth description of your services and USP in the ‘long description’ section.

Step 7: Post your first post!

It’s worth posting something whilst you’re here just to test things out and see how it all looks. Plus it would be a shame to come this far and not post!

Post an image, something sexy, and preferably not a stock image! Maybe post a picture of some of your work or even your team.

Make sure you include some text. If you don’t plan on maintaining your Facebook business page by posting regularly at this point, make sure the text directs any visitors to take action and include a link to your website if possible (remember the benefits of backlinking). Don’t just say “Hey, this is our first post on Facebook!”. People can see that for themselves!

If a visitor arrives at your Facebook business page, your post will be one of the first things they see, so this is a perfect opportunity to sell your capabilities. This is a great place to put your core marketing message (if you don’t know what a core marketing message is, check out this post - to be posted on our blog, link to be provided)

If you want to get going quickly, simply post something like “For all your laser cutting needs get in contact now!”

Step 8: Make a brew and chill the hell out!

Well done, you made it! That wasn’t so hard…

Final thought. It is possible that Facebook has already created a very basic page for your business - this can be automatically generated for a number of reasons. You can merge these autogenerated pages with your nice shiny new official page with all of your accurate business information, but it’s really not essential. It can also be a bit tricky, but here’s another guide to help those who just can’t help themselves!

We hope you found this guide useful, keep an eye out for upcoming articles in this kick ass series helping you improve your web presence by 1000% in 10 minutes at a time!

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