If you have a personal Facebook account, then you can create and administer a business page from your personal account. This has certain advantages over a standalone page (see below): you can use your existing friend list to spread the word and invite people to 'like' your page and you can 'like' other pages. Note that you do not have to reveal yourself as an administrator/creator of your page, neither do you have to reveal yourself in your private account as a page owner. But you can if you wish.

To create your Facebook page, log-in to your Facebook account, click on the little arrow, top right in the blue bar, and go to account settings.  At the bottom of the settings box there is a line of text links: About, Advertising, and Create a Page - click on that.

You are now asked what kind of page you wish to create. It's worth stopping and thinking for a moment about exactly what you want. You can delete a page if it's wrong or no longer needed, but you may have difficulty retrieving and re-using the name you chose.

Decide which of the boxes fits your business best. If you're unsure, click on one and check the choices in the drop-down menu that appears.  You can check through all of them before deciding. Facebook also allows you to change both the box category and the description after the page is live.

You have to fill in the details, and agree to Facebook's terms before you can proceed. Note that Facebook is fussy about the names it allows, including specifying that they must be appropriately capitalised. Think carefully about the name, because at a certain point (on achieving 100 'Likes' as this article was written) you will be unable to change it.

You are then taken through the set up windows and invited to add photos and information. The description should be informative and include keywords, such as product names, that potential customers might search for or be interested in. But don't worry too much about these as they can be added to or changed at any time.

Now you should see the beginnings of your Facebook page. Facebook invites you to like your own page. You don't have to do this, you can do it later if not now. It also invites you to give it access to your email lists. Again, you don't need to (in any case, it can only access online email clients such as Hotmail or Googlemail - it will search for any email addresses in your address books that match a Facebook account. Personally, this writer wouldn't, but you may feel it is a useful tool). Finally Facebook invites you to update your status. Do this or click 'skip'.

And there you have it, a Facebook page. It probably looks very skeletal, but it works very much like your personal Facebook account. There's a photo upload facility, you can create events, 'you', that is your page, can post changes to your status.

There are a few basic housekeeping things to note. At the top right of the blue header bar is an arrow. Click it and it offers you alternative identities ("Use Facebook as.."). You will probably wish to post in the guise of your page/business within your new page. Explore the Admin Panel dropdown menu at the top of your new page. In here are privacy settings and and a host of other settings. We shall examine these in the next article.