When you're setting up a Facebook page for your business or favourite local organisation you usually think it's going to be relatively straightforward - especially if you're a technically-minded person to begin with. However, there seem to be several steps in the process of getting things properly set up that are not at all intuitive and can be quite irritating to work out.

It also makes your organisation look unprofessional in the meantime, while you test out different ways of making things work as you would like. Here's a run-down of some of the least intuitive things Facebook page makers are presented with and how you can fix things to your liking.

Posting On Your Facebook Page As Yourself

Most people understand that there's a few ways to toggle between posting as yourself or as a Facebook page administrator. You can click the toggle button on your Facebook page just before posting or you can click on the drop down list in the top-right of Facebook to choose which of your pages or primary account you will be using Facebook as. However, many new page creators find that no matter what they do they're posting on their page as the page, not themselves. This is very confusing and unprofessional when there are multiple page administrators and they are replying to comments.

Many Facebook page administrators think that's just how it is, but that's not the case. There's a simple fix - it's just hiding. Go to your page and click "Edit Page", then click on "Your Settings". You'll find that there's a checkbox there which ensures that you will always post as your page whenever you're posting on your page. Uncheck that, save the changes and you will be able to choose for yourself. You'll now be easily able to see who you are posting as by checking the photo to the left of the comments box.

How Do I Make Like Buttons, Like Boxes and Badges For My Page?

Facebook likes to hide useful things. To find these "like" buttons, badges and other social plugins (like the activity feed), it seems they'd like you to wade through the help section first. Instead, here are the links:

facebook page admin

Should Website Visitors Like The Website URL Or The Facebook Page?

This is a big question - and my answer for most smaller websites is "both". For those who don't quite understand the question, consider this. When a user visits your site and they see a "like" button, should that like be liking the www.yourdomain.com URL or should the like make them a fan of your Facebook fan page?

Of course you want your website to become more popular. Ultimately, there's a huge Internet outside of Facebook and your website needs to be popular despite Facebook's walled garden. However, anyone clicking a Facebook "Like" button (wherever you are on the Internet) expects that it will result in updates from your Facebook fan page. Plus, this is how you can best communicate with this person via Facebook. So ultimately the Facebook fan page is the most important to feature a like button for.

When setting up social plugins, I therefore recommend using a small like button for the website URL somewhere unobtrusive, plus a large "Like Box" for the Facebook fan page which shows user pictures.

Linking Twitter & Facebook

Twitter has tried to make it easy for you to link your Twitter account to your Facebook page, but it's still got a few quirks that can be a pain. Start by logging into your relevant Twitter account, head to Settings > Profile and then click on "Post your tweets to Facebook". Easy so far, right?

facebook page admin tips

Here's where the problem lies. While setting up your Twitter-to-Facebook connection you need to change the default posting privacy of the Twitter application to public otherwise it won't show up on the fan page. If you're privacy-conscious you've probably got your default application posting privacy set to "friends" or some custom lock. So, no-one's going to see it. Until you change it to public, Facebook will ensure those posts don't wind up on your public fan page's wall.

If you've accidentally skipped past this bit, you can change the Twitter application's post privacy level by changing the privacy settings in Facebook for the Twitter application.

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You'll also need to ensure that Twitter is set up to post to the correct Facebook page and not to your own account.

More Facebook Page Administration

If you're a Facebook page admin, you might also find these articles useful:

What else have you had difficulty with setting up on your Facebook page? How did you fix it?