Creating a business page on Facebook
Having recently gone through the process of creating Facebook.com/officeanswers I thought I would write it up in case it helps our virtual office customers and others.
The starting point assumes you already have a personal page on Facebook already because you will use this to be the administrator of your business page. I ran into a problem when trying to create the short name for my business page described below as my personal Facebook page had not been verified. If you get this as well when doing the steps below you have to follow the instructions to have a text message sent to your mobile with a code, and once the code is entered you are verified and can continue with the process.
So, to start log into Facebook on your personal page then to create your business page go to the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
You are probably going to choose “Company, organisation or institution” which will prompt you for a category and the company name (or you may choose “local business or place” which will ask for more address details). The company name will be permanent and can not be edited so double check your spelling.
Tick the box to agree to the terms and click Get Started.
This will create your business page and you can start adding information. The first thing to do is add some info, such as company overview, products, business telephone number.
You are now up and running, but will have noticed that your page has a long and unfriendly address, such as
http://www.facebook.com/pages/officeanswers/12345678912345678
How do you turn this into short name so it reads facebook.com/yourcompany ?
Previously to get an address like this you needed a certain number of Likes but this is no longer the case, you can move straight into registering your page. Go to
You should see a section with a drop down box which shows the pages for which you are registered as the administrator, so this should show your business page. Select your business page in the drop down box and then enter your desired username.
Click “Check Availability”.
If your desired name is available you will get a confirmation box with some warnings that you need to read before you proceed. Once you do proceed the username is created.
You should now be able to go to facebook.com/ your company name
If this has helped, please give our page a “Like” on facebook, www.facebook.com/officeanswers
Thanks
Ian
Updating Google Places
I have neglected our Google Places entry and it needed updating. This used to be called Google Local and it basically gives you a marker on the Google map when searching for something at a given location. We have had this set up for our Manchester business address but it was not linked to the main website. I have updated it today and within the hour a search on Google for Manchester Virtual Office makes our entry (about position 3) stand out as we have the map marker.
It did n’t take long to update so now I’m wondering why it took so long to get around to doing it! It will be interesting to see if the number of enquiries for the Manchester area increases over the next few weeks.
Upgrading to Sage Accounts 2012
I’ve been upgrading our accounts system from an older version of Sage Line 50 to Sage Accounts 2012. Overall it has been quite a smooth process but there were a couple of problems I came across which are described below with the way we got around them. There have n’t been many things in the user interface that have impressed me. When doing a customer receipt it does bring the bank account up which is useful to stop accidently putting the receipt against the wrong account.
My main grumble has been that scrolling up and down and selecting does n’t work the same as every other program in the world which is intensely annoying. There is no change in 2012.
The problems I found were:
1) Custom reports seemed to have disappeared
2) All accounts were set to use transaction email which is not a system we use.
The first of these was easy to fix. We have our accounts data on a network drive and had saved the custom reports there but Sage 2012 did n’t find them. The work around was quite easy, open the Report Designer from the Tools menu, browse to the folder with your custom report and open it. Then use Save As and save the custom report to the default folder location.
The second problem with transaction email looks more significant. Every account had an option in the email section for “I send invoices to this customer via transaction email”. This was n’t in our old version and had become set on every account. We eventually found a way to turn it off using batch change. Highlight a number of accounts, click Batch Change, tick the box and then untick it. Click Save. Hopefully this will have turned it off on all the accounts you selected.
Good luck if you are going through the same upgrade.
Ian
New Year Resolution – start your business
The New Year is normally busy for us as we get enquiries from people who have made a New Year Resolution to start their own business. What an excellent objective for the year. Some are ready to proceed, others are checking prices as part of working out their costs, and they are all interesting conversations to see what people are up to.
January 2009 was very quiet when optimism about the economy was rock bottom. January 2010 saw a dramatic change and January 2011 is looking good as well. I sometimes like to think we are barometer for business confidence in the country as we focus on startups and businesses with less than 5 people. I have six years of figures now for enquiries coming from people starting a business and in this context January 2011 figures look encouraging, if not quite as quick as 2010.
So if you are starting a business give us a call as we are always happy to talk through the options and will ensure you have clear prices for your plan.
Snow affecting business levels
Friday 3rd December and deep snow across most of the country. Just been looking at call volumes through our telephone answering service and yesterday’s calls were 22% down compared to Thursday last week. Volumes are normally fairly level so that is a big drop. Let’s hope the thaw comes soon and business gets back to normal.