Continuing our guides on setting up and using Facebook to engage with your community. This article covers how to get people to like and follow your Facebook page for your town, parish or community council.

• It’s a good idea to create a username for your page. You’re username will mean that you get a facebook address like this: https://www.facebook.com/[mylocalcoucnilpage]. This will be easier to share with people who you want to visit your page and publicise on your page. To create a username, click the ‘See more‘ link on the left of your Facebook page (just under where your council name appears), then select About from the list that appears when you have clicked. You can change the page username by clicking on the link next to Username (will probably be @username the default). This will launch a new window where you can add your username. It will need to be unique to Facebook – as you type it in, any errors will appear in red. Once Facebook is happy with your username you will see a green tick at the right of the window. Once you have added it, click the ‘Create Username’ button to save your changes. If you are new to Facebook and haven’t added a phone number to your main account, you may get an error message when doing this. To fix it, simply add your phone number to your main account and it should work perfectly.
  
  
• Invite all your Facebook friends to like your new page.
  
  
• Publish posts and invite your local community to like the posts. That way their friends and other people in your community will see you posts and may well like your page too.
  
  
• Publicise your new page in your minutes, newsletters or other information you send out to your local community.
• Put a poster on your noticeboard with the address of your Facebook page.
  
  
• Use and ‘email signature‘ that includes the address of your Facebook page. An email signature is information that you set up to appear at the end of email messages you send. It can include contact information. For how to to set these up just Google ‘set up email signature’ and the name of the email program that you use eg gmail.