Utilising Facebook marketing to promote your business is almost a prerequisite in this digital age. The first step is to set up your page correctly to maximise the marketing potential this social networking platform offers.

There are some key things users new to Facebook should do before they get started. Facebook didn’t start out as a business to business marketing platform and they have been playing a little bit of catch up to keep up to date with the way users want to utilise the facility. In the bad old days many businesses set up a page as if it was a person because there was no facility to transfer administration of the page, therefore if it was attached to an employee and they left the business the page had to go with them, which did not make for efficient and professional Facebook marketing. Now Facebook easily lets you add and remove administrators and you can easily transfer the management of the page to another person, however care must be taken with giving administration rights to others as there are no permission or authorisation levels which means they can remove administrators and delete the page without permission from anyone else.

For those of you who still have a business set up as a profile the first thing you should know is that it’s against Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to have a profile page for anything other than a human, this means if you have a profile page for your business, favourite band or pet cat are all in breach if they aren’t set up correctly – best case scenario, people won’t “friend your business” losing you potential connections, worst case scenario Facebook can remove your page – leaving you with no page and losing all those connections, not the most professional look for your business.

Although you still require a profile page in order to create a fully functioning business page, (you can create a business page without a profile however it has limited functionality), Facebook now allows you the ability to ‘act’ as your page which enables you to like pages and interact as your business, leaving your personal profile completely private and separate to your business listing making your Facebook marketing more professional and functional. A great new add on to this is the ability to tag your business in images just as you would tag your friends – this allows you another opportunity for branding. You could tag your logo, when a photo is taken at your venue or included in corporate or sponsored functions.