If you’re thinking about creating a professional Facebook page but are unsure of where to start, don’t worry—you’re not alone.

As anyone familiar with the site will tell you, Facebook changes and evolves its features regularly. It can be a proverbial moving target for marketers who are trying to find the best steps to set up their professional page.

In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the benefits of having a professional Facebook page—rather than your own personal profile—and best practices to accomplish your goals.

Best practices for developing your brand on Facebook

You don’t want to put off starting your professional Facebook page any longer. The social media behemoth is starting to penalize people who use personal pages for business. Plus, a business page offers additional value. A few benefits of using a professional page include having insights into your visitors and campaigns, tabs for promotions or business information, and greater scalability.

But where do you start? How can you be sure your page is set up for success? Never fear—our team has you covered. Here are eight tips for creating your professional Facebook page.

1. Select your classification

Facebook offers six different types of business classifications, each with its own relevant fields. Review the list below, understand each, and decide which best fits you and your needs.

• Local Business or Place: Fields include About, Hours, Contact Info, Address, Price Range, and Parking Info.
• Company, Organization, or Institution: Fields include Founded, Mission, Awards, Products, and Address.
• Brand or Product: Fields include About, Founded, Awards, and Products.
• Artist, Band, or Public Figure: Fields include Birthday, Affiliation, Biography, Address, Gender, and Interests.
• Entertainment: Fields include About and Release Date.
• Cause or Community: Fields include Description, Cause Type, and Cause Group.

2. Get a “good” URL

Your URL is your web address on Facebook, so it is important that it is easy to remember and type. The best URLs are short; include your company name, and don’t have any hard-to-remember additional characters or numbers.

3. Understand your admin panel and settings

Under your professional Facebook page settings, you will find a navigation bar with sections for notifications, page info, and page roles. This is where you will designate any additional admins for your new page, and assign various roles to them.

4. Populate your page with content before you promote it

The basic information and content you should publish to your page before starting to promote it includes:

• Posts: Facebook has different options for public posts, including an event page, text status, photo status with caption, link sharing with caption, video sharing with caption, and location check in.
• Profile photo: Typically, this will be your logo or a professional headshot. This is one of the first things that visitors to your page will see, so it is important that the image is high quality, easily recognizable, consistent across all of your social media platforms, and reflects your overall brand identity. Get tips for taking a professional looking photo.
• Cover photo: This is the large, horizontal photo that makes up the top of your Facebook page. It is best to use an attractive and branded image that will help attract people to your page.

5. Spread the word

Getting the word out about your Facebook page is crucial. Even the most well designed Facebook page is useless if it doesn’t have any traffic. Add links to your Facebook page on your website, email signature, business card, brochures, and other promotions. Tell your customers and prospects about exclusive content on your page. And consider running targeted Facebook ads. (We can help with that.)

6. Ask for reviews

Your goal in using Facebook for your business should be to convert prospects to clients, and having client reviews on your page can be influential. Start by contacting recent clients, co-workers, or anyone in your sphere of influence, and ask them to write a review on your page.

7. Post relevant content—and post often

Develop a signature style, or voice, and then deliver content that is appealing and informative to your consumer. This will increase consumer engagement and drive traffic to your page.You should use your posts to show off your brand’s “personality.” And only about 20% of your posts should be promotional; the rest should be informative, inspiring, or fun bits of information that resonate with your audience.

8. Pin important posts

Pinning important posts keeps them at the top of your page and ensures that your visitors will see them. Consider pinning important and timely posts, such as information about fun promotions you are running, a post directing visitors to your blog, or even a glowing review from a recent customer.

. . . and just like that, you have a professional Facebook page that is primed for success!

Want even more ways to increase your social media presence?

If one of your goals for this year is to increase your social media marketing or to better help you reach out to your clients and grow your customer base, ReminderMedia can help.

With just three clicks, you can set an entire year’s worth (or more) of engaging, shareable social media posts that are branded to you. We do all the work—there is nothing else like it on the market today! From our library of thousands of posts, we select engaging, relevant, and timely posts and add them to your Facebook and Instagram platforms according to your schedule while you maintain control—set it and forget it, or add, remove, and change any post at any time! This is a genuine game-changer. Check out Social Media Automation, one of the five tools in our Digital Marketing Platform, and with no effort, exponentially increase your presence on social media.