If you’re opening a business, you need a Facebook page before you need almost anything else on social media. It’s where people check that you exist, it’s what shows up when they search your name, and it’s a hard requirement if you ever want to run ads.
It takes about two minutes and it’s free. Here’s the whole thing, step by step.
Before you start
You need a personal Facebook profile. There’s no way around it. Business pages are created from a personal account and managed by it. If you don’t have one, create a profile first and come back.
Have your logo, a cover image, and a one-line description of what you do ready before you start. You can add them later, but a page with no logo looks abandoned, and first impressions get made the day you share the link.
How to create your Facebook business page
- Open Facebook and log in to your personal profile. Do this on a desktop computer if you can. It’s possible from the app, but the desktop version shows every field at once and you’ll finish faster.
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Go to Pages and choose to create a new page. The Pages icon sits in the menu at the top of your profile.
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Enter your page name. Use your real business name, exactly as it appears on your signage, your invoices and your website.
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Pick your category. You get up to three. Start typing what you do and Facebook suggests the options it recognises. These are what people browse and filter by, so pick the ones a customer would actually use to describe you, not the ones that sound most impressive.
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Write your description. A couple of sentences on what you do and who you do it for. Say the thing a customer is checking for: the service, and the area you cover.
- Create the page. That’s it, it’s live. Now add your logo as the profile picture and a cover image, and the page stops looking like a placeholder.
Fill these in before you share the link
A new page is a shell. Four things turn it into something worth sending people to:
- Contact details. Phone, website, and address if you have a location customers visit.
- Hours. Facebook shows “Open now” or “Closed” based on these. Wrong hours cost you calls.
- A call-to-action button. Call Now, Book Now, or a link to your site. It sits at the top of the page and it’s the most-clicked thing on it.
- Three or four posts. A page with an empty feed reads as inactive. Photos of real work are enough.
Then what
The page only earns its keep if something lands on it regularly, and doing that by hand is what kills most business pages within a month. If you have a website with a blog, you can push every new post to the page automatically. No plugin, and it takes about ten minutes to set up once.
And if the reason you’re creating the page is that you want to run ads, this was the prerequisite: you can’t advertise on Facebook or Instagram without one. The page is step zero, not the strategy.
Running ads to a page that isn’t set up to convert is the most common way local businesses waste a budget. That’s the part we handle.
