How to set-up face­book for a business

 Face­book now allows users to cre­ate ded­i­cated “pages” for busi­nesses, prod­ucts, brands, etc. I setup our page this week­end and thought I would share some insights for those think­ing about doing this. 

1. You will need a per­sonal Face­book account to setup a busi­ness page. The rea­son is that busi­ness pages are man­aged and cre­ated from within your per­sonal account as well as accessed via your per­sonal login. So if you try to setup a busi­ness page first–which you can–you will actu­ally be going through both setups at the same time. I was unaware of this and was a lit­tle con­fused that it kept ask­ing for my per­sonal infor­ma­tion. My advice would be to setup your per­sonal page first then add your busi­ness page afterwords. 

2. Once I real­ized I had cre­ated both per­sonal and busi­ness pro­files I tried search­ing for my newly cre­ated busis­ness page. It would not come up in my search results. To fix this you need to become a “fan” of your busi­ness page. Appar­ently with­out any fans your page can‘t be seen when you search. 

3. Set­ting up the biz page is easy with rel­e­vant fields for your com­pany descrip­tion, mis­sion, prod­ucts, founded date, etc. 

4. Groups vs Pages: Pages are new, but many com­pa­nies have already setup groups for their prod­uct or busi­ness. I had found a few that had both a group and a newly cre­ated busi­ness page, which to me seems redun­dant. The key ben­e­fit of pages is the abil­ity to access the new Face­book ad plat­form, which is pretty cool and described below: 

5. Focused Ads: I only played around with this for a few min­utes but it seems like a pretty cool way to focus your ad dol­lars. From your busi­ness page you can cre­ate a capaign which allows you to pin­point demo­graphic info, loca­tion, key­words, etc for your cam­paign. When you fill this infor­ma­tion in Face­book cal­cu­lates the poten­tial num­ber of users that fit your tar­get pro­file. For exam­ple, Sin­gle, male, age 25–35, grad­u­ated from x col­lege, lives in x state, has key­word inter­est like wine, wine drink­ing, red wine, etc, might show 5,000 users. Change a vari­able, and the user num­ber is auto­mat­i­cally recal­cu­ated. Your ad will only go to this group of users. 

Next step is to set your daily bud­get and how much your will­ing to pay per click through. High bids gives you bet­ter exposure. I might try a small exper­i­ment in the future to see how this works. I have read some folks get­ting good results at $.20 — $.50 per click. Over­all, a pretty cool system. 

5. I was very sur­prised how many other busi­ness in my industry–mostly Wine 2.0 folks and other blog­gers–were setup on Face­book. I made sev­eral con­nec­tions in just a few days. Not to men­tion, all my other freinds, asso­ciates, etc, that have pages and who will become part of our viral net­work. 

I wold love to hear oth­ers thoughts about how they are using Face­book. Please leave a com­ment or include any addi­tional resources that you are aware of. 

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