Facebook is constantly changing the way it works but there are some fundamental things you need to do to get the best out of it.

Setting Up - things that you must get right

• Set the page up as a business page from your personal profile. If you set the page up and pretend its a person then you will very likely get blocked in the future when Facebook find out. You can choose what type of page you want but a local business page is probably the best one to choose if you want people to be able to check in.
• Make sure you have more than 1 admin on the account, otherwise if your personal account get blocked or hacked you might lose access to the page.
• Enter as many details as you can in the about section, the more info you have here about your location, website, opening hours etc the better as it helps with your page being found and shown to people in searches
• Use great photos of the correct size to make your cover page look great.
• Get your Facebook url, the bit after the www.facebook.com/......  When you set up the page you will be automatically given a page url that will have lots of numbers at the end so when you share your page the url wont be very descriptive. You must select your own url that will be easy to remember
• Set up the 'call to action' button

Posting Best Practice

• Set up some of your team to be editors and they can then post on your behalf
• You can post immediately or you can programme a post to appear at a later time, use the drop down arrow on the post button and click schedule. You will be able to pre load as many posts as you want to in one go. You can check the when your fans are looking at their Facebook page so therefore the best time to schedule a post by clicking on 'Insights' then 'Posts' to see a chart
• Video & Photos are the best way to get more reach, ie shares,likes & views
• Competitions are great for engagement
• Offers can be set up on your business page as well
• You can also set up an event and invite people too
• Ask people a question in a post to get a reply and therefore more coverage
• Ask people to share your post

Advertising on Facebook

• NEVER use the BOOST POST button unless of course you want to waste some money in double quick time! Always use the create adds tab.
• Set the audience for your advert correctly, you don't want to be paying to advertise to people who are never likely to visit you. Use the location and demographics settings to fine tune who gets shown the ad.
• Set the costs tightly and ensure you put in an end date into your advert.
• Review the ad after its has been going a few hrs
• Use great pictures to get peoples attention
• Select a great Headline that will make people click
• Put a Facebook  tracking pixel on your website so that you can advertise to those people who visit

Insights

• Visit the insights tab at the top of the page regularly, there is lots of information available to you that will help you with marketing your business.

Get their email address

• Facebook can change and does change its algorithms regularly to squeeze out more revenue so there more likes you get the more reason there is to get their email address from them. Then when Facebook start charging for or limiting posts reach you will have a database of your fans to email them outside of Facebook.