How to Create a Facebook Page for Your Restaurant or Cafe

The fastest and easiest way to put your business on the web is to create a Facebook page. And it’s free! You might already have a personal Facebook account, but a page for your business is independent from that and is not publicly connected unless you want it to be. 

If you’re still reading then you probably know why you should have a Facebook page for your restaurant or cafe, but in case you’re not on board yet, here are just a few of the benefits of having a Facebook page for your hospitality business:

• Publicise your business on the most popular website in the world
• Allow your existing customers to show their allegiance to your business
• Communicate instantly about things that like specials and events
• Provide a link between your website and your Facebook page which creates traffic both ways
• Create a virtual presence which relates to your real world location

To expand on this last point, when you have a Facebook page, anybody who is at your restaurant or cafe and uses Facebook can "check in" on Facebook via their smartphone, laptop or iPad. This is why Facebook is a must for hospitality businesses - places like these are a prime place for people to relax, take a weight off their feet, and socialise. What's the way most people socialise these days when they're out and about by themselves? That's right - Facebook.

Having your business registered on Facebook as a physical location (via your address) and as a page means that when someone opens Facebook on their phone, they are prompted to link their location to any status update they make. Or even if they aren't making a status update, they can just check in to show their friends where they are. Having your business pop up on that person's timeline means you just alerted all their Facebook contacts to the fact that your business exists. The average Facebook user has around 130 friends, and the kind of person likely to check in while they are out and about is more likely to have 300+ friends. That's a hell of a lot of free publicity for your business.

The culmination of many of these benefits is something I touched on in my last article, Five ways hospitality businesses can improve their online presence, which was about turning regular customers into "brand ambassadors".

Today we're going to do a tutorial on how to create a Facebook page for your business, one step at a time. It won't take long, and you won't have to spend a lot of time maintaining the page or adding content. Unless of course you want to.

Getting Started

1. First, you will need a personal Facebook account of your own. Don't panic. If you're one of those people who has never used Facebook and never really intended to, this doesn't mean you need to start. All it means is that you have to register an account. You don't need to add friends or join groups or anything like that if you don't want to. You don't even need to use your real name (see below). You simply need to have your own personal account to be able to create and administer the business page via your own account.

Once you've created your business page you will be able to add one or more people with Facebook accounts (e.g. one of your staff members or your partner) to administer the page. This means that they will be able to make updates and interact with your page followers as the business. A single page can have multiple administrators, all speaking as the one voice of the business.

So, step one will be for you to create your own Facebook account. If you already have your own personal account on Facebook, you can move on to step two. To create an account, go to Facebook now and follow the very straightforward steps to create your own account. Don't worry about filling in all your profile details if you don't want to. All you have to do is provide the basic details that Facebook requires to register you, which is your name, email address, gender and date of birth.  Many people choose to use a pseudonym on Facebook, so that they can have a Facebook account but still maintain their privacy. Examples of this might be using your middle name as your last name, or calling yourself something else entirely, such as your business name. There are no hard and fast rules about having to use your real name.

Create a New Page

2. Once you have a personal Facebook account and are logged in, you should see a Search box at the top centre of the page. Go to that search box and type "create." As you type, options should appear in a drop down box. One of the first options should say "Create a New Facebook Page." Click on that option.

3. You should now be on the "Create a Page" screen, where there are 6 categories for new pages. Select Local Business or Place, and from the drop down list select what type of business you have (there is a category for restaurant/cafe).

You will now be prompted to enter the details of your business such as name, address and phone number. Enter those details; as you type in the City/State field, Facebook will start suggesting locations for you from its worldwide database of places. When you see your suburb pop up (e.g. Collingwood, Melbourne, Australia) click on that and Facebook will fill that in for you. Tick the box  to say you agree with Facebook's terms, and then click "Get Started".

Add a Picture

4. The next page you come to will be a page asking you to provide a picture. The profile picture is a small square picture that will be displayed next to your status updates on your followers' timelines, and will be the secondary picture on your business's page (we will get to the main picture soon). Ideal pictures for this might be your cafe or restaurant's logo, or a picture of your business from the street.

You can come back to this step if you don't have any pictures of your business yet. If you enter your website address, you will be prompted to choose any of the pictures from that web page. Note that it will only find pictures on the specific page, it won't search the whole site, so if you enter your home page you won't get the option to add pictures from your Gallery page. If you want to add a picture from your About Us or Gallery page, you will need to go to that page and copy and paste the exact address into the field.

Alternatively you can upload a picture from your computer, or from another website (e.g. Menulog). Remember the profile picture is square, so if the picture you choose is not square, it will be cropped or resized to fit the square frame.

 About Your Business

5. Next is the "About" section, where you will be prompted to enter a description of your business. Use this to put a sentence or two summarising your business. Treat this as a sales pitch as well as for information. An example might be "Smith Cafe, Smithton. Serving great coffee every day, next to the town hall" or "Smith Cafe. Smithton's favourite stop for fresh baked bread since 1982." You get the idea. This description will be what people see when they visit your page to check you out, and also when they search for a business in the Facebook search. So it should be something that spells out exactly where you are (there might be a lot of Smith cafes) and what you do.

In this section you will also be prompted to add another site. You can add your website or Twitter page here. Don't worry if you don't have any other sites to add at this stage, just save the info and move on to the next step.

Finishing Touches

It’s nearly finished! Now that you've entered the essentials, you will be taken to your actual page. This is how it will look to visitors, minus the administration panel at the top, which is only visible to you and other people you assign as administrators (you can also hide this section to give you more of an idea how the page will look to visitors). Technically this is all you need to do to create the page, but the following additions will add a lot of information and aesthetic appeal to your page.

Find some initial followers

6. Once you get here, Facebook will make some suggestions about ways to promote your site, starting with Liking it with your own personal account. This is up to you, but unless you have a good reason not to, you should "Like" your own business with your personal account. You can skip this and any of the following steps if you don't want to do it now. You will have the option to come back later and use these features.

Facebook will now give you the option to invite Facebook friends to “Like” your business page. This won't be relevant if you only just created your personal Facebook account. But if you have some friends on Facebook, take this option and choose which of your friends you'd like to invite from the list.

Next you will be prompted to add email contacts. Facebook will ask for your email details and they will scan your email history for people you know who have Facebook accounts. You can then choose which of these people you want to invite to “Like” your page.

Your first status update

Facebook will prompt you to share something by writing on the page "wall". This is the section where all your updates and messages go, and will be visible to anyone visiting the page. In future when you have followers, every time you share something here it will be posted to your followers' Facebook “News Feed” along with their friends' updates. Note that you don't just have to post text updates here, you can post photos, videos, links to other websites, as well as notifications about upcoming events and milestones for the business. For now it might be a good idea to skip saying something here and have a think about what you'd like your first update to be. There's no hurry, once again you can come back and add this at any time. An example of what you might post here for the first time might be something like "Welcome to our new Facebook page! Stay tuned for regular updates about specials and events at Smith Cafe."

Flesh out the details

7. One of the final things you need to do is update your business information such as opening hours and types of food and drink served. This is all done via your "About" section, which you can find under your profile picture, near your business address and phone number. Click the “About” link and then click “Edit” in the right hand pane where it says Basic Info. This will bring up a page with lots of details about your business. You can put as much or as little info in here as you like, but the more you put, the more information customers will see when they visit your page. At the very least you should put your opening hours.

Add a cover photo

8. Lastly, you have the option to add a cover photo to your page. A cover photo is a kind of mural which will be the face of your business on Facebook. There are some requirements about what you can and can’t have in your cover photo. You can’t have specific details promoting your business such as a special offer or calls to action like “Buy now!” or similar. The idea is for it to be an original graphic that summarises your business. It might be your logo, or it might be a photo of all your staff, or even some kind of collage if you want to get really adventurous.

The thing to remember is that the cover photo is a very specific size: 850 x 315 pixels. This means that it is quite wide and not very high, as you will see from the following examples. Your choice of cover photo doesn’t need to match these dimensions exactly, but it should be roughly the same proportions or you will need to crop or stretch parts of it. If you have a picture that you think would be prefect but it’s the wrong size, you can use a free graphics editor like Gimp to crop or resize the picture before you upload it.

Here are three great examples of effective Facebook cover pictures for food businesses:

Now What?

Now that you have a Facebook page, you need to let people know. Put signs up in your business telling people you have a Facebook page and asking them to follow you (grab our free sign to print yourself - it's exactly A4 size so make sure you change it to Landscape and remove any margins). Run a promotion where you give away a free meal or a voucher to someone who follows your business over the following month. “Like” other businesses or local organisations with your business's Facebook page to show people you exist and are part of the community. Ask your staff to support the business on Facebook by following and inviting their friends to follow (making some of them administrators of the page is a great way to get them involved and ensure your page will be regularly updated).

If you have a website, get your web designer to add a Facebook Like box to your page so customers can Like you with a single click via your website, and make sure you mention any promotions associated with Facebook on your website. 

Add photos and updates regularly to show that the page is dynamic and active. Even if you don't have many followers, people who are just browsing your page will see that it's worth following and will be more encouraged to Like you.

You can switch between your personal account and your business account very easily by using the drop down box in the top right hand corner of the screen. There will be an option to switch between your various pages. Just be aware of whether you are logged in as you or your business so you don't make any mistakes with which account you are updating.

Don't be alarmed if your page doesn't soar to the stratospheric heights you might be expecting in the first week. These things take time. You might only have one or two followers for the first few weeks, but as awareness grows, your page will start to snowball. 

Please leave a comment (you don't have to sign up or provide your email address to comment) if you found this tutorial useful and share your Facebook page with us! If this all seems too much, we can create your Facebook page for you, free of charge. Enter your details on our Free Facebook Page Creation form and we'll be in touch with the details of your new page.