Facebook – Setting up a Successful Page

With over a billion users, Facebook is not one to ignore. However many fall into a pattern of letting their page get left behind, either by not responding to questions or not updating important features. As a golden rule – to make Social Media work, you must be Social. We look over the basics and important setups that you may have missed even if you do have a page, to make sure you’re on a strong ongoing path of connecting to others!

Create a Facebook page

From an already active account create a new page for your business. Once you have created a page you can access and edit it from the drop down at the top right hand side of the window. To go back to your personal profile just repeat the same process.

 

Get to know the Admin Panel

Facebook provides an admin panel for managing brand pages. It gives you a notification panel which has all the activity that has recently been occurring, and a panel of all your most recent likes. The insights box provides you with a timeline of the effectiveness of your posts and like demographics, this can currently only be accessed after 40 likes. Hovering your mouse over the data will show the numbers of people who are talking about your page and the number of people reached by a particular post, and the dates and times of posts.

Look and Style - Tick all the boxes

If you make sure you’re satisfied with how your page starts you won’t have to constantly worry about and attempt small updates. Ensure that you make your profile look aesthetically pleasing. Ensure you are using high quality pictures for the cover photo and profile picture, Facebook can auto crop these though if it doesn’t fit well be sure to resize the originals. Fill in all the relevant information, especially in the about area and the link to your website.

 

Here is an example of a fantastic facebook brand page.  Notice the likes to talking about this ratio. Roughly half of little cupcakes fans are engaged by their page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why you should do this, vital signs to stay on track

Strategically, Facebook is great for developing your community and forwarding people onto your website and blog in a natural manner. Due to its reach potential it is excellent exposure, and with good content that gets shared it is basically free marketing.  Here are a few insights to think about when monitoring your Facebook numbers:

Likes – The total amount of people who have liked your page. It is just as important to see if this number is dropping, which could mean you have annoyed or misled people with your posts.

Talking About This – The average number of people creating a ‘story’ about your page, meaning they have commented/ liked or otherwise interacted with your posts. This is a good weekly indicator of generally how popular your output is.

Were Here – This is more of an option for those who visit your physical location, some businesses heavily reliant on foot traffic will run promotions to push the use of this so that customer’s friends can see they were there. If it is not relevant or if you don’t think people would like to post that they “Were Here” then it isn’t completely necessary.

Post Likes and comments – Don’t fret, it may take some time for these to reach a higher pattern and develop a healthy number of ‘regulars’ who might always have something to add.