What Nobody Tells You About Facebook Pages

Hardly had I typed the last paragraph (about how Facebook constantly alters their page structure) and published this post, when Facebook announced a New Look for Pages! For more information on this upgrade scheduled for March 1st, 2911, check out my next post in this ongoing series!

Creating a Facebook page is an excellent way to gain exposure for your business, build a buzz, and actively engage with clients. It is a simple process, and Facebook has recently added big welcoming graphics to make the process seem even easier. They let you choose between making pages for a:

1. Local Business or Place
2. Company, Organization, or Institution
3. Brand or Product
4. Artist, Band or Public Figure
5. Entertainment
6. Cause or Topic

What they haven’t added is information telling you what the structural differences are between those choices. I will focus on this one point today (though there is lots more to say about creating good pages) because it is the first and most important choice you will make in starting your page.

Here is what you see when you go to Create a Page:

Most people will choose “Local Business or Place” when setting up their page. This is an excellent choice for restaurants, but not for businesses without a storefront or regular hours. Why? Because of the limited amount of information you can enter about your business using this template.

After you choose between the six buttons, select a category to describe your business, and give your page a name, you can begin editing your company information. Go to the “Info” tab and click the small “Edit Information” link, and you will see a screen that looks like this:

Each page type lets you enter Basic Info, Detailed Info, and Contact Info in this section of your page. But the contents of these sections differ between page types. Once you choose a page type (no matter what “category” within that you choose), you will only be able to show certain types of information about your business. As you can see above, for a “Local Business or Place” page, the only Basic Info you can give is “About.” And if you then click on Detailed Info, you will only see entry fields for store hours, location, website, parking information, and a general description.

The good news is that you can leave a field blank and it simply won’t show up on your finished page. There is a lot you can’t know about Facebook pages until you actually create one and realize you made the wrong choice. I don’t know any other place on the web where you can get a break-down of what the different page choices allow you to share, so here, for your convenience, is a list of all your options.

As you can see, the Entertainment and Causes pages are a little thin on detail, so you might want to choose another template to set up a page for your pet project.

Of course this is all subject to change, as Facebook is continually altering its site layout and options. And it is only the tip of the iceberg: there are lots of things you can do to optimize your Facebook business page, some of which you really should do right away. But those will have to wait for another post. Meanwhile, I hope this is useful for you, and steers you away from one of the most common mistakes in creating Facebook business pages.

Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook Pages