The Button Under a Facebook Page's Cover Photo

A button most pages leave blank

Since December, Facebook has been adding a call-to-action button to business pages. It sits just under the cover photo, beside the Like button, in the most visible spot on the page.

An admin chooses the label and the web address it opens. Anyone who taps it, on a phone or a computer, goes straight to that address.

Many pages still have no button at all. Many others have one that says Book Now and opens the home page, leaving the visitor to start looking all over again.

It is a small setting, and a cheap one to get right.

The labels on offer

• Book Now, for appointments, classes, tables and rooms.
• Contact Us, for businesses that start with a question or a quote.
• Shop Now, for anyone selling online.
• Sign Up, for a newsletter, a membership or a waiting list.
• Watch Video, for a business whose story is best told on screen.
• Use App and Play Game, for businesses with apps of their own.

The first deserves a look from most local service businesses, because a booking is usually the step just before the money. If customers can book online, this button should lead straight there.

Why the home page is the wrong answer

Someone who taps Book Now has already decided what they want. The home page asks them to decide again: find the menu, find the right item, find the form.

On a phone, that can mean four or five taps through a menu designed for a computer, and every extra step loses a few people who were ready a moment ago.

A button labelled with an action should land on the page where that action happens. Anything else breaks the promise on the label.

Choose the one action

A page gets only one button, so the choice matters. Ask what most new customers do just before they pay you.

For a salon it is booking a time. For a contractor it is asking for a quote. For an online shop it is buying, and for a club it is joining.

Choose the label that matches that step, even if another sounds more exciting. A button that promises one thing and delivers another is worse than none.

Link to the exact page

Then point the button at the page where the step happens: the booking form, the quote form, the shop's main category, the sign-up form.

That page should open on whatever the label promised: dates and a booking form for Book Now, a short form and the phone number for Contact Us. Anything a visitor must scroll past first costs taps.

Check that the page works on a phone. Facebook's app opens links in its own built-in browser, and a booking system built only for desktop screens fails right there.

If bookings run through an outside service, link to your own page that holds the booking form, or to the service's page for your business, never to its home page.

A worked example

A sushi making class runs three evenings a week and on Saturday afternoons, twelve students at a time, in a rented commercial kitchen. A chef teaches rice, rolling and knife work, and everyone eats what they make.

The Facebook page had good photos of students' rolls and a button that said Contact Us. It opened the website's home page.

Classes were booked through a calendar page with seats and payment, two menus deep. People who found the class on Facebook sent messages asking for dates, and some never wrote back after the reply.

The button now says Book Now and opens the calendar page directly, which shows the next eight classes and how many seats each has left.

Each class announcement on the page links to the same calendar, so every route from Facebook ends where a booking can actually be made.

Setting it up

Whoever manages the page can add the button. On a computer, the option to create it appears where the button will sit, beside the Like button, and it asks for a label and a web address.

Both can be changed at any time from the same place, so nothing is locked in by the first choice.

Open the destination page in a browser first and copy its full address from there, rather than typing it from memory. One wrong letter sends every tap to an error page.

Tag the link so it can be counted

Visits from Facebook arrive in Analytics under several referrers, and some from the phone app show up as direct visits with no source at all.

Campaign tags added to the button's address solve that for this one link. A source of facebook, a medium of social and a campaign name such as page-button are enough.

Then Analytics shows how many people arrived through the button, and what they did once they got there.

When the website changes

The button keeps whatever address it was given. When the site is redesigned or the booking system changes, it can quietly lead to an error page for months.

Add it to the list of things checked after any website change, along with the Google listing and the links in email signatures.

And tap it yourself, from a phone, once a month. It takes ten seconds.

The counter-case

Some businesses get little from the button. A trade whose customers phone rather than book will do as well with Contact Us leading to a page with the number at the top.

A page with few visitors will see few taps, whatever the label. And the button only works as well as the page behind it: a slow or confusing booking page undoes it.

Still, the setting takes minutes. Choose one action, link it to the page where it happens, and check it after every change.

This week

1. Look at your page as a visitor would.
2. Name the step customers take before paying.
3. Choose the label that matches it.
4. Link to the exact page for that step.
5. Add campaign tags to the address.
6. Tap it from a phone and complete the step.
7. Recheck it after any website change.

Step six is the one that catches the real problems. Following the button all the way through, on a phone, to a finished booking shows every place a customer could give up.

What to post on the page itself, now that plain sales posts reach fewer fans, is covered in what Facebook counts as too promotional.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.