How to Set Up a Facebook Page for Your Business (UK Guide)
Setting up a Facebook Page for your business takes about twenty minutes, and most of that is deciding what to write in the About box. It’s free, it stays free unless you choose to pay, and it’s one of the first things a new business owner tends to do.
This is the walkthrough. No pitch, no “ten hacks” — just the steps in order, the one requirement everybody worries about, and an honest note at the end about what a Facebook Page will and won’t do for you.
First: yes, you need a personal Facebook account
This is the question that stops people, so let’s get it out of the way.
A Facebook Page is not a standalone account. It’s created and managed from a personal Facebook profile, and there is no way around that. If you search “how to create a business facebook page without personal account”, you’ll find a lot of pages promising a workaround; there isn’t one. Meta requires a real person to be behind the Page.
What people are actually worried about, though, is different: will my customers see my personal profile? No. Your Page and your profile are separate things. Customers see the Page — its name, its posts, its photos. Your personal profile, your friends, your holiday photos and your surname are not shown to people who visit the Page. Other admins you add to the Page can see that you’re an admin, but that’s it.
If you genuinely don’t want a Facebook account under your own name, the honest answer is that a Facebook Page isn’t for you — and that’s a perfectly reasonable decision. A Google Business Profile and a website will do more for a local business anyway.
Setting the Page up, step by step
- Log in to Facebook with your personal account and go to the Pages section (in the menu, or at facebook.com/pages/create).
- Enter the Page name. Use your business name exactly as it appears everywhere else — on your van, your invoices, your Google Business Profile and your website. “Bennett Plumbing & Heating”, not “Bennett Plumbing and Heating Ltd — Emergency Plumber Tonbridge”. Stuffing keywords into the name looks amateurish and Meta may make you change it. Consistency across platforms is the entire point: it’s how Google works out that these are all the same business.
- Choose a category. Start typing what you do and pick the closest suggestion — “Plumber”, “Hair Salon”, “Café”. Be specific rather than broad. You can add two more categories after the first.
- Write the bio. One or two sentences: what you do, where you do it, who for. “Domestic plumbing and heating across Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. Boiler servicing, repairs and bathroom installations.”
- Create the Page, then work through the setup panel Facebook shows you.
What to fill in once the Page exists
An empty Page is worse than no Page. Fill in all of this before you post anything:
| Field | What to put |
|---|---|
| Profile picture | Your logo, square, high resolution. Not a photo of a van with the logo somewhere on it. |
| Cover photo | Your best photo of the actual work, or the shopfront. Wide crop — check it on a phone. |
| Username | facebook.com/yourbusiness — pick the shortest sensible version. It’s what goes on printed material. |
| Phone | The same number as your Google Business Profile and website. One number, everywhere. |
| A business address, not a personal Gmail. (Here’s why that matters.) | |
| Website | Your site. If you don’t have one yet, this field is a good reason to sort that out. |
| Address or service area | An address if customers visit you; a service area if you travel to them. |
| Hours | Real ones. Wrong hours generate wasted phone calls and irritation. |
| Action button | ”Call now” for trades, “Book now” if you use a booking tool, “Send message” if you’d rather talk in Messenger. |
Then add a handful of photos. Not stock images — your work, your premises, your team. Ten decent photos of finished jobs will do more than any post you write in the first month.
What it costs
Creating a Page is free. Running it is free. Posting is free. Replying to messages is free. There is no subscription, no verification fee for an ordinary local business, and no catch.
The only time money is involved is when you boost a post or run an ad, which is entirely optional and something you have to actively choose. Facebook will suggest it constantly — a “Boost post” button under everything you publish, and notifications telling you your post is doing well and could reach more people for £8. Ignore it until you’ve got a reason not to. Boosting a post about nothing in particular, to no particular audience, is the most common way small businesses waste their first £50 on Facebook.
”My Facebook Page isn’t showing up”
Four ordinary explanations, in the order worth checking:
It’s unpublished. During setup it’s easy to leave the Page in a draft state. Check Settings → Privacy → Page visibility and make sure it isn’t set to unpublished.
It’s brand new. Facebook’s own search takes a little while to surface a new Page, and Google takes longer — sometimes several weeks to index it at all. There is nothing to fix here except patience.
It’s too thin. A Page with a name and nothing else has almost nothing to match against a search. Categories, a bio, an address, hours and photos are all signals. Fill them in and it improves.
Something else has the name. If there are three businesses called Elite Cleaning, Facebook has to choose, and it generally favours the one with more followers and activity. You won’t win that by waiting. Being consistent across your Google Business Profile, your website and your Page is what eventually distinguishes you.
Be realistic about what a Page does
A Facebook Page is excellent at one job: staying in front of people who already know you exist. Regulars, past customers, the local village group where somebody asks “can anyone recommend a decent sparky?” That’s real, and it’s worth twenty minutes of your time.
What it is not good at is catching the person typing “emergency plumber near me” into Google at half nine on a Tuesday night. They aren’t scrolling Facebook. That search is answered by your Google Business Profile and your website — and if you’d like the fuller argument about how the two fit together, we’ve written about social media versus a website separately.
So: set the Page up properly, link it to your website, and then spend your remaining effort on the parts that get you found. A good order for a new business is Google Business Profile first, website second, Facebook Page third, and free directory listings after that.
Here’s where we declare our interest, since the third of those is our business. If you’re a new UK business with a Page and nowhere to send people, our team designs and builds you a proper website from your Google Business Profile — your services, photos, hours and reviews already in place — free, on a free .co.uk domain, live within 48 hours of the domain being registered. Hosting at £24 a month including VAT is the only cost, with no minimum term. You can see exactly how it works and decide for yourself.
Fill the Page in, put the website link in it, and let each one do the job it’s actually good at.