A few weeks ago, I shared the process to Create a Facebook Page for Biz, Brand, Cause and More. As I explained, the process only takes a few minutes. At least that was the experience I had when creating pages for various businesses located in the United States. I was recently creating a new page for a rental vacation home in Mexico and there were some bumps in the road.

While I did hit some bumps in the road, I was able to create the page. It just took 20-30 minutes longer than expected because of the bumps. So first, I’ve embedded a “Like Box” for the page below so you can visit and even Like the page.

Now let’s talk about the problems I encountered and the solutions to those problems. On the initial screen, I selected “Local Business or Place” which gave me the form shown at right. Remember, this is a vacation rental home in Mexico and there is no place on the form to enter a country. I found that odd since “local places” exist all over the world.

While the home has an address, it doesn’t have a street address. No mail has ever been delivered and there is no street. I can’t leave the field blank so I found the address of a hotel about half a mile from the home and used their address to see if it would work. Facebook accepted it and yet the “dot” on the map was still not in the correct place for the vacation home or the hotel. At least it was close and explain how I tried to fix it after the page was created.

I tried various combinations of City/State before I found one that was acceptable to Facebook. Then I got to phone and Facebook had me really stumped. There is no phone in the home and the contact phone number is a US number. It wouldn’t accept the number as it seemed to know it was outside of Mexico. Ideally, the field would be blank though that wasn’t allowed either. I finally plugged in a number of the local Property Manager for the home and that was accepted. Whew, I was allowed to click Get Started and the page was created!

A profile photo and cover photo was quickly added so the page looked nice. Now the goal was to fix the location and the phone number. I know the exact geographic coordinates of the house, but Facebook won’t allow that. When you ask Facebook to edit the address, they bring up a map powered by Bing and give you the ability to move a pushpin to the exact location. I did that only to be told that it couldn’t detect a street address for that location. Duh, there is no street! The end result was to leave the location that is somewhat close. It was very disappointing that Facebook doesn’t have a better way to identify an exact location when a “street address” doesn’t exist.

My first attempt to change the phone number failed as well. I didn’t want to be deterred so I tried again a few minutes later. I wish I had an explanation as to what I did differently, but that second time I was allowed to enter the US number.

I still have more work to do on the page and I would still like to get the location to be more accurate. But it is a start and it provides another marketing tool to promote the vacation rental home.