Facebook is the second most popular website on the internet after Google. That fact is more powerful when you remember that people who visit Google are primarily looking to go somewhere else, whilst Facebook is a place people spend on average twenty minutes per visit.
On January 29, Facebook published their fourth quarter and full year results for 2013. The report highlighted a number of interesting statistics such as:
- The daily active users for December 2013 was 757 million (on average)
- The monthly active users for December 2013 was 1.23 billion
- Daily active users increased by 22% over the year and monthly active users increased by 16% over the year
There have been lots of news reports over the last six months that Facebook could lose 80% of its users by 2017. The figures above, that were published for the benefit of investors, suggest that the stories of Facebook losing popularity is nothing more than rumours and spin. The truth is that Facebook remains the largest social media service on the internet by a long margin.
Be sure to follow Elegant Themes on Facebook
One of the best ways of tapping into this huge wealth of traffic is to create a Facebook page for your website. In this tutorial, I would like to walk you through the steps necessary to create a
Quick Note:
Those of you who do not like Facebook will be annoyed to hear that you need to have a Facebook account in order to operate a Facebook page. It is also frustrating that pages are tied to your personal account as it makes it difficult to disable your Facebook account in the future. If you manage pages, the only way to disable your personal Facebook account is to create a second Facebook account and migrate all pages to that account. Facebook does, however, frown upon this.
How to Create a Facebook Page for Your WordPress Website
New Facebook pages can be created at https://www.facebook.com/pages/create/. Six options are available including pages for local businesses, brands and products, and causes and communities.
The initial page presents you with six options.
The box for “Brand or product” allows you to select website as your purpose. Other options, such as causes, allow you to control whether the group is available to everyone or if it is closed. Facebook Pages Terms also need to be agreed before you proceed.
The “Brand or Product” box is suitable for website owners.
On the next page you can add a description of your page and define your website URL. It is common for website owners to display their website URL in the description as well to increase clicks to their website.
You also need to agree to a disclaimer that you are authorised and an official representative of your website.
Enter the URL of your website and a small description that describes the page to visitors.
You then need to upload a logo from your computer or from a URL. Depending on the nature of your website or blog, you could use your website logo or a photograph of yourself.
You can upload your logo from a URL or directly from your computer.
Next there is an option to add your new page to your Facebook favorites area. This section is displayed prominently at the top left hand side of the Facebook home page. All of your pages are listed underneath the favorites section, therefore it is not essential that you add your page as a favorite.
You can add your page to your Facebook favorites so that it is displayed prominently whenever you login.
That is all there is to it; however, as you can see, your initial page looks a little bare.
Your Facebook page will look a little bear when you first view it.
One of the main things missing from your page initially is a cover photo. Uploading a cover photo will help you distinguish your page and convince more people to follow you. You can also use photos that have been uploaded previously as a cover photo.
Be sure to add a cover photo.
Be sure to use a large image for your cover photo. If you are struggling to find a suitable image, I recommend searching for good desktop background images. Alternatively, you could hire a designer to create something unique.
As you can see, the simple act of uploading a cover photo makes your Facebook page look much better.
Do not look at cover photos as optional; they are a vital part of branding your page.
At the top of your page you will see a navigation menu. It links to various settings and statistical pages. It also lets you login as your page; which allows you to like pages and publish comments on Facebook as your page (i.e. as opposed to your personal account).
The top navigation menu can be viewed from your main Facebook page.
The general settings area allows you to modify page visibility, add filters and add restrictions. You can also delete your page from this area or merge it with a similar page you own.
A number of settings are available in the general information page.
The page info area allows you to add information about your website such as foundation date, physical address, contact telephone, email address, and more.
Information about your website and business can be added too.
By default, you will be set as a manager of your Facebook page. This allows you to change your page settings and update your page as you see fit.
You can also add other people as managers, content creators, moderators and advertisers. Insight analysts can see statistics about your page.
Staff can be assigned various roles and permissions.
The Facebook insights page allows you to see the growth of your Facebook page. It also highlights how many people have seen your post updates and their level of engagement. As your page grows, you will need to pay more attention to these stats (though this is not an area I will delve too much into in this tutorial).
The insights helps you analyse the performance of your page and see how followers are responding to post updates.
Many of you will create multiple Facebook pages. To switch between your pages, click on the cog icon at the top right hand side of the page and select the page you want to manage.
You can switch between pages at the top right hand side of each page.
Last, but by no means least, you need to publish updates to your new page. Publishing updates to your page works in the same way as publishing a message to your friends. It also has an extra feature that lets you schedule posts for a specific time and date. This is essential for scheduling posts in advance.
An empty Facebook page is pointless, so be sure to connect with your readers and post updates.
Creating a Facebook page is easy and only takes a few minutes to complete. Every website owner should create one for their website and engage with their readers, even if it is only to share news updates or announcements of new articles.
I hope you found this tutorial useful. If so, I encourage you to follow us on Facebook for our latest blog updates.
Thanks so much Kevin! This was very helpful for me to set up my blog Facebook page. I haven’t used Facebook at all for personal use in years, and wasn’t sure how to go about it for a blog. I appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us!
Thanks for the write-up Kevin, will have to follow this process for a number of pages that I need to put together – maybe an update to the article is needed to reflect the current FB changes?
Cheers,
David
I could never figure out which one of the six options I need. Thanks for clearing that up!
Ok, so i’m confused… so if i start a blog going the fb route, i won’t have to pay for hosting and my domain name? But if i go through your regular channel (wordpress.org), i do? Please clear this up for me Kevin, thank you very much.
Thank you for this article. I’m new to blogging and this helped me a great deal. The extra insight in the comments are also extremely helpful.
Great! That’s just what I was looking for, thank you!
I was trying to create a Facebook page for my blog ( http://www.latestmotorcyclereviews.com ) and they were asking for date of birth and every personal information… Then I found your site explaining that we need a personal account to be able to create a Facebook account, that clarified some things…
J
Kevin,
Thanks for your step by step guide.useful post 🙂 waiting for your next post
Great article!! Thank you. Is this the best route to go when wanting your WP Blog also auto create post to your FB Timeline?
Thank you for this tutorial. It was really helpful. I didn’t know what I was doing but you cleared that away.
I tried looking for the stats page but luckily I found out in the web that it needs 30 likes before I could see it.
Thanks kelvin find this Really interesting and easy to follow up while setting up a facebook page. U need an extra credit for this, but sorry I got none now. Great post keep up buddy
This is great post, Facebook is a very strong part of traffic source, there for every one should make it seo friendly and SES friendly here great tips for this.
thank you! this was the best tutorial i’ve found so far in my little google search 🙂
but i still ave a question…will the fact that i created this page as well as every update/post i make show up in my friends’ news feed???
Only if they like your page on Facebook.
Thanks Kevin. I am searching to find out how to create facebook pages which helps in creasing my website popularity and you have very well presented this topic in a very easy language.
You’re welcome Wayne 🙂
Hi, great post and comments!
I’m sort in the middle: I want a facebook comment box inside my “Contact” (Flexible theme) page, but I’m lost how…
I’ve tryed plugins, but they don’t have the great support ET brings me… but I think ET support is not supposed to help me with third party plugins…
Could you please… 🙁 help me?
Thanks, Mauricio 😀
You can manually add a Facebook comments page to any page.
See https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments.
Hi Kevin,
Thx for the useful tips provided and more so your follow-up to comments is like none I’ve ever seen, kudos!
Q. Do you have/know of a common sense tutorial for setting up Facebook apps for connecting to WP websites? Talking simple here, just connecting for analytics, sharing posts, post counts… Not for logins or comment system either.
The plugin FB provides kills site speed, I currently just create an app in dev.facebook with minimal input, just enough to get an app id/secret key and connect it thru Yoast SEO but I always feel like I’m missing something in the app permissions I could utilize. Thank you!
Hey Jeff,
From a developer point of view, it is not something I personally have a lot of experience with. I tend to use plugin solutions developed by others.
For checking shares etc, I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-metrics/. For checking traffic, I just check my stats via Google Analytics.
🙂
Kevin
I’m a bit confused about this. I have a personal FB account for my friends, and I maintain personal blog/twitter/instagram accounts for everyone else. I’ve been thinking of promoting the blog etc. by creating a Facebook page as well. So thank you for the tuturial.
Then to the question: In my social media life I have a lot of followers on blog/twitter/IG and I would like to “like” (or “follow”) their FB pages as well. When I hit the “like” button, will it show as a like from personal private self, or as a like from my FB page/person? I do not want several hundreds of my likes to pop up on the newsreel of my private/personal FB profile.
Use the option at the top right hand side of your Facebook page to login as your page. This allows you to switch from your personal account to your page. Once logged in as your page, you can leave comments, post comments, subscribe to pages, receive private messages etc.
🙂
Even though it’s pretty basic but I find this post very useful. Because sometimes we tend to look over the basic stuff and might actually miss something. I’ll double check my fanpage with this post for sure.
Thank you!
Thanks. We have a mix of beginner and intermediate users here, so it is important for us to do basic tutorials too 🙂
Great post..thank for share
No problem.
Another question Kevin.
When you get to the facebook business page you see 2 options: “Like” and “Follow”. What is the difference between liking a business page and following it?
I’ve searched the internet of course but the answers are usually vague or mutually-exclusive.
Thanks.
Elijah.
Hi Elijah,
Can you post a URL which illustrates what you are talking about 🙂
I’ll take a look at it.
Kevin
Here you go:
https://www.facebook.com/cocacola
https://www.facebook.com/Ivritours
https://www.facebook.com/Skylark.Design.Studio
You can see the Like button on business pages and then you you can follow the page.
According to http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/12/05/facebook-to-change-subscribe-to-follow/, it replaced the old Subscribe buttons that allowed people to follow personal accounts. Though I’m not 100% sure why coca-cola would have one displayed.
I agree. I will speak to Nick about this and see if he can address this issue.
This blog at some point becomes so narrow that whatever text you right look like haiku poems
I’m not sure.
Subscriptions allowed anyone to follow your own account. For example, if I enable subscriptions, I can allow people to follow my personal account. Essentially, this saves me having to update a personal account and Facebook page.
Though I don’t know why they have both on offer.
So what’s the difference between like and follow, sorry still don’t get it.
I get the idea of follow – you don;t need to be approved to see the content in the news feed. But if you like the page – I think the result is the same?
Hi Kevin, thanks for the article. I started really struggling with the whole idea as to why facebook page is needed in general. Bear with me 🙂
1. Lets say you create your page and really work hard to build your audience.
2. Then you spend money on advertising your page
3. Then you realize that even though your audience is growing – your new posts reach only a small fraction of your friends.
4. Then you realize that this is happening because the way facebook works – you have to pay facebook to reach your audience.
So unless you are really willing to pa for promoting your posts, creating a business page doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
Hi Kevin, thanks for the article. I started really struggling with the whole idea as to why facebook page is needed in general. Bear with me 🙂
1. Lets say you create your page and really work hard to build your audience.
2. Then you spend money on advertising your page
3. Then you realize that even though your audience is growing – your new posts reach only a small fraction of your friends.
4. Then you realize that this is happening because the way facebook works – you have to pay facebook to reach your audience.
So unless you are really willing to pa for promoting your posts, creating a business oage doesn’t seem like a great idea.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
You are not wrong Elijah. That is unfortunately the way Facebook works. I lost a lot of money because of this when they switched their algorithm a year and a half ago. You will probably only reach around 5% of your followers with any given update. I spoke about this last year at http://www.kevinmuldoon.com/facebook-page-reach-decreased/
The most successful Facebook pages are updating many times per day because of this.
Despite this, Facebook is a powerful tool. People visit it daily and spend a lot of time on the site.
Do you know if the same will happen if I switch to personal page instead of business one? Will I still need to pay for my posts to reach my audience?
Do you know if Google + charges to reach the audience?
Yes it’s the same for both. I can see why Facebook implemented it as people began liking pages too frequently, which meant their feeds were full of spam. But it was not fair to advertisers who had spent a lot of money with them.
As far as I know, Google is launching an option to promote posts soon. They have been testing it with some big brands already.
Thanks a lot Kevin
Hello!
Just to say thanks for this article. It’s very helpful.
May I request the same process for a google+ page?
Many thanks!
I’ll suggest this to Nick 🙂
Great post Kevin
Surprising how few people make full use of their FB accounts in this way and make a good job of creating a proper cover and selling themselves and their businesses
Useful link to show some ideas of what can be achieved and to download a Photoshop template for a guide http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/creative-facebook-timeline-covers/ if you have access Photoshop (any version) of course…..
Keep up the run of posts they are very useful even to some of us older hands – who may have forgotten some of the tips and tricks to make our WordPress sites better and more secure….. alongside our Elegant themes of course ;-))
David
I am guilty of not using Facebook enough myself. At the moment, I mainly just use my pages to update followers of my latest posts.
Thanks for the link to the covers. In hindsight, I should have included a reference to something like that myself.
Glad you enjoyed the article. I am also guilty of forgetting that some people are new to WordPress and need advice on setting up certain things correctly. We have a lot of great articles planned so hopefully we focus on topics you will find useful.
You give step by step guide with screen shots that resolve my big issue thanks. and keep updating and give me more information regard this . Thanks
You’re welcome Aamir 🙂
Great tutorial. I will use this when making new pages in the future. Thanks !
Glad you found it useful Billig 🙂
Great article Kevin,
You may have to do an update in a week, Facebook announced that they are changing the look and feel of the pages.
Oh dear haha. They always seem to do this after I write a post about Facebook! 🙂
Thanks for this article its exactly what I needed. I have just made a page https://www.facebook.com/dexeter.net and I am now making another one for my brothers business.
I have been wanting to leverage Facebook for a while but did not know how until now.
You’re welcome Ray. Best of luck with your new page.
Nice tutorial Kevin. Easy to follow and written in layman’s terms. Facebook and a good social media presence is vital these days. I am guilty of not using FB to its full potential but plan on getting more involved. Infact this article has given me a heads up on a few settings I need to configure on my page. Thanks Kevin.
Thanks Steve. I prefer to write tutorials in a step-by-step way as that’s the way I like following tutorials myself. 🙂
Once again a nice post from Kevin. Thanks.. As far as increasing the LIKEs and hence, the exposure of the page goes, I believe we must understand whey we need LIKEs to our pages. It’s better to have 500 genuine likes from friends than 5k non-genuine/fake likes from people who do not even see my pages on their feeds because they are tailored to like as many pages as they can in their lifetime (they are actually paid for doing this ).
I personally ask my friends to have a look at the page, show them my current status/post and then ask if it will be okay for them to give a like to it. However, I do not request them second time since if they are just forced/bugged into liking my page, they would probably do so, but they will not see/like my subsequent updates on that page and hence, that LIKE will go wasted. So, better to have engagement from 10 people than showing my page to 10k people with no engagement at all.
Agreed. Targeted traffic and targeted followers is the way to go. We all need loyal followers who will engage.
Hi,
Thank you for this post, it is very clear ! Is it possible to transfer a page created in “Local business or place” to “Brand or product” ? without losing all likes..
Many thanks
I believe you can do this through the category tab that is located under settings and page info (though I’ve never done this myself).
Could you run through how to get WordPress posts appearing on your Facebook page? I’ve been having trouble getting that to work
thanks v much!
If you are using Jetpack, you can do this using the sharing module. There are many plugins that let you do this as well, and services such as HootSuite allow you to publish updates from your RSS feed direct to Facebook.
Thank you for the post! Will there also be a tutorial in the future that shows how to create and embeed a facebook widget into the widget area of WP-Blogs?
I will speak to Nick and see if that is something he would like me to cover 🙂
Yeah, that’s good tutorial to create FB fans page..
But i have create fb page before and i wrong typo for facebook page name.
then i can not change my fb page name because fb said that i i have fans more than 200 people. so This does not allow to change.
Can you give me idea on how to change Fb page name in like more than 500 people?
thanks
I am not sure if it can be done, which makes it all the more important to get it right first time. I know that is not the answer you want and does not really help you in your position; however Facebook are quite poor in helping people out like this unless they have a huge following (i.e. they will help out big companies but not the little guy).
As per https://www.facebook.com/help/www/271607792873806, “If 200 or more people like your Page, you can’t currently change the name of your Page.”
Only option seems to be to create another page and ask all followers to like that page; though I suspect you’d lose a lot of followers in the process.
Thanks for share Kevin, detail information of Facebook page for WordPress.
You’re welcome Dipak 🙂
Great tutorial, I thought of creating a Facebook page these days and your post comes in handy.
This is my Facebook page just baked following your step by step guide:
https://www.facebook.com/wplearner
Glad you found it useful 🙂
Great article, thanks!
If I set up a business page – can I set it so posts to my business page ARE NOT shown on my personal facebook page (to my friends)?
I want to keep business separate from my friend page.
That is the way all pages are set up 🙂
Friends will only see your page updates if they like your page.
Great walk through…I recently setup my page at http://www.facebook.com/Designs4TheWeb to promote my website but I set it up as a local business/place. Is there a way to change it to a brand/product page? Is there a difference between a local business page and a brand page? I just started out so it won’t be a big deal if I have to destroy and rebuild.
I’m not sure if there is a way to do that. I checked the settings area, but there does not seem to be an option for changing the page type.
Thanks for checking Kevin. After reading your post, I found this article and subsequent matrix of the differences between pages.
i have seen many “facebook templates” “facebook timeline templates” sold… like you can customize these page? is that true? any clue haw can you aplly any template or make our own?
Merci beaucoup pour ce petit tutoriel
Great info, it would be very helpfull some psd templates to match the images in facebook page, to be clearer, i mean something like this:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-r24y29OZ5lE/T5WSe-EfsLI/AAAAAAAAAHY/fxU1W3GJ2RY/s1600/facebook+timeline+creative+profile+17.jpg
http://media02.hongkiat.com/facebook-timeline-covers/aly-moffatt.jpg
Yeah there are many great templates out there. I’ve not used one myself as yet 🙂
Kevin, do you read minds too? I just tested the facebook ad for a week to see what happen to my new facebook page. To get the facebook insights feature one need 30 likes. I got 32 likes in a week. I, however, have no clue why they liked my page!! I assume, they have no interest about the content of the page too. Well, I may be wrong.
I think, organic likes are far better than paid likes. Thanks for this article. Cheers.
You should always avoid paid advertising on the web as they all seem to be a scam. FB ads and Google with adwords are stealing from us!
I’m not sure. If you liked the page yourself, it would show on your feed. Perhaps that would have been enough for friends to like (though I’m sure you would have noticed if it was friends who were liking your page).
Have you promoted the page in any way?
No, I have not promoted. I was just curious to test how things work if I paid for a page. I was curious after watching the following doc:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/generation-like/
Thanks again. 🙂
Kevin, what I suggest it’s to post an article helping us in how to integrate an wordpress blog with facebook. Sharing a post in WordPress to a Facebook page is easy but how to post in FB and automatic create a new post in WordPress?
Thanks!
Someone else asked this in another post (not sure if that was you too).
I can’t think of any reason why someone would need to do that. Perhaps a few people do, but I doubt there is a big market for it. Therefore, unless there is a developer who has a similar need, I don’t see a plugin like that being crated.
To me, it always makes more sense to publish your content to your blog first and then share that update on Facebook. Putting duplicate content issues to the side, it is not practical to copy updates from Facebook as they will not be formatted correctly for your blog. For example, wrong width for images, no categories or tags selected etc.
Some of my clients love to work and publish with Facebook. Let’s say that they don’t wan’t to learn a new “platform”… So, even that there is duplication, no tags, no categories, etc. for a final user it’s easier.
Even that I share your opinion, sometimes we must use the client t-shirt and understand their needs.
I agree with you on that. 🙂
In that kind of situation, I think something like Tumblr is much more suitable than WordPress as it is designed for short post updates.
Thank you very much!
You’re welcome.
Facebook is a good tool for a blog/website’s social media aspects. You can even replace wordpress comments with FB comment box using some plugins.
But be careful when you decide to spend money on FB advertising, they’re not so great: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag
Thanks teko, this YouTube video helped a lot. Gives a clear picture the whole thing is $$ driven, with very little engagement.
I saw that video the other week. I’ve spent a lot of money on Facebook advertising so I was alarmed about what he found out; mainly because my own pages seem to be having the same problem of low responsiveness.
I don’t see Facebook ever refunding advertisers.
Great article as always.
I found that ‘Boosting’ a page is a much improved method on FB over their advertising. You definitely see more response and growth.
Rob
http://www.thecoffeedrop.com
Thanks, Great tutorial !
Glad you found it useful Daniel 🙂
Great resource Kevin
It will help me remember and I can bookmark it for clients to help them set up their own Facebook page.
Thanks Keith.
Nice article as always – I do find Facebook pages are a great way to direct people to your website as I do with mine. Most people are on Facebook so it’s well worth spending the time to create one. My page is http://www.facebook.com/jwshoots
Thanks Mark. Glad you liked the article.
That’s awesome. This article really helps me to create my own site’s page. Thanks Kevin.
https://www.facebook.com/tellyupdate.in