How To Use The Facebook Appointment Booking Feature (2023 Update)

Hey everyone, this is Shaun with Blue Cow Marketing, and a couple years ago I did a video about the Facebook scheduling or booking appointment feature within your business page. And over time that has been evolving, and I've gotten lots of comments, and I got a request today in one of the comments saying, hey Shaun, you should do an updated video. And here I am, and that's what we're going to do today. Now if you've been poking around in Facebook, you've noticed there's been a lot of changes in the business side for your page. I've been impressed with how it's working. I've been impressed with how it integrates with your Instagram account. There was a time where it was a little sketchy there and, uh, you know, things weren't really connected. So we're here to talk about the appointment setting, and I'm also going to do another video coming up on kind of more overview of what you can do in here. So let's start with talking about appointment booking. When is this appointment setting option great for you? It is great for you if you have a very simple type of setup where you have, you know, maybe a couple different appointment types that are there and you don't really need a lot of function. This would be great for you. If you want to have a lot more flexibility, I would recommend you go look at something like Calendly. You can get a great free account with them, one appointment type in there under that free one, uh, work great with you. Even if you go to the paid upgraded side, um, you know, it's a few bucks a month,, but you're gonna have the ability to do a lot more with it than you will in here. But anyway, let's go and hop into your business page. So you're gonna go to your business page that you hopefully are an admin for. If you're not an admin and you're not seeing any of this, then your account settings need to change. So where do we go when we find this information? When we come in here, you should see on the left-hand side this little panel of menus, and we're gonna scroll down to the appointment side. And when we do that,. It may be collapsed or not. Oh, there we go. If we click on the appointments, it's gonna go into this type of menu system. Now I'm gonna go back and just show you that again. So you're gonna scroll down and you've got appointments and then you got appointment settings. If you do the appointment settings, you're gonna get this. So let's look at that first. Um, and you can get to it from the other way as well. And I'll show you that when we get it over to the calendar. First thing is first is you're going to update your time zone here. So we are here in the East Coast. Canada set, you can click change and do that. You can also test your booking tool here. Now we're not using it, so it is turned off, but if you want to do online booking, you can simply slide this on. There we go. Uh, and then you get some other options in here. So once the booking's on, customers can see your available appointments they want to book with any time. We can click on this and now you can set your dates and times you want them to pick. When I did this last, obviously I just picked the one day, but let's just, we're gonna turn on Thursday and we can go ahead and check tick the different times. If you want to split that day and let's say you want to finish at 11 and then you want to add in, okay, I'm going to come back at 1 and go to 5, you can do that as well. So we're going to click save. Okay, next, do we want to sync with our Google Calendar? So we turn that on, it's going to pop up and it's going to allow us to pick our Google account just like this. And this is going to be key. If you live and die by your calendar, you want to make sure that it is looking within those windows of time to see if you got something that's on there. So If somebody's going on there and they wanna book at, let's say Thursday at 1 o'clock, but in your calendar you have something already, we don't want to see that shown, uh, to them. We've got options here for book instantly. Customers receive a confirmation instantly and you can still reschedule or cancel, so we can turn that on. Uh, if it's not, you're gonna need to approve that, uh, booking. We got double booking. Clients can request appointment times that already have bookings. Close that over there. Um, already have bookings, uh, you can require approval or confirmation of that request. I don't want to turn that on because I don't want to open up and double book my calendar. Now, advanced bookings control how far in advance people can see or schedule your appointments. This is great because in here, when we go in to change this, we can say when is the soonest somebody can book your calendar. I've got 3 hours here. You can change that to days or weeks. Um, if you do it within a couple hours, it could surprise you and show up on your calendar. And you don't know what's there. And then how far out do you not want them to get too far away? So, so you can change that up as you go forward. Uh, appointment start time delay. So select the length of time between the appointment time slots. So this allows you to say, okay, if somebody books, let's say at 1 o'clock for an hour-long appointment, we don't want somebody to book at 2 o'clock. It's gonna look for times and then give that kind of buffer, um, in there, right? So, um, That's, that's what you're going to want to have, having it start different. Actually, this one here, when I look at this now, uh, starts every— so this is the, the slots in which they start, uh, on there. So every 15 minutes, every 30 minutes, or every 60 minutes, it's there. Then we go down here and we see our service list. So we can— this is all the stuff I picked up before and I added in here. So you can different— add different services that you want. We're going to edit the service. In here is we get to set, uh, the title, the description, you want to show it or not, the duration of this. So in this case, it's 30 minutes and up. Block the times here, so block every 30 minutes. So we can set that by the different type of appointments. Now we got reminders. We can turn that on and people can book using the different reminders that are here. And do you want to get notification on Facebook? Yes. Or do you want to get your notification by SMS? There we go. So those are the settings that you have to play with for your appointment booking. Now let's go down to the actual calendar here and we'll see what we can do within this. So in here we can go ahead and we could create our own appointment, right? So we can put in a customer's name and we can manually put that in there. So you have that ability to do so. Um, you can click on the calendar at any time and it will actually then pick those times and you can do the same thing. Under your appointments here, you got upcoming, requested, confirmed, or archive. So there's some ones from before that were in there. Uh, and then again with the settings here, this will take you back to that settings. Um, oh, I got different settings in here. Okay, perfect. So in here, um, it's just showing it in a different view. So we've got our availabilities here. Uh, we've got our online booking here. So available on Facebook, time zone approvals, manually approve appointments. That's turned off. Um, double bookings, notifications, and customer reminders, all that stuff. So pretty much everything that was in the previous one, um, is showing here. Now, one of the common questions that I received in the comments was, how do I put this on my website? How do I embed that on my site? Well, by looking at this, it doesn't look like, or easily, that I can find that there's an option to embed this on your site. So let's just go back here to my main page, and we're going to come down and we're going to go into these appointment settings. Now there, once we show up here and turn it on, we got this share booking link. So here it is here. So we can copy this, and I can open up another tab, and it's going to direct people right to this here. Now they're not going to see all this stuff on the left side, but they can go ahead and book, you know, from Facebook. They actually have to have a Facebook account, uh, to do so. And when they do that, now it's not gonna allow me cuz I'm one of the admins, but they can click on it and they can pick the time and everything. So there's no way to actually embed this in your site like you would, you know, another scheduling tool like Calendly or one from your CRM. You would simply just have to take that link and make a button on your website that would flip them over to Facebook to go ahead and, and do that and pick those times from that. So like I mentioned, it's very basic in nature. If you're, if you're doing a lot of traffic through your Facebook page and you have, um, that functionality enabled, then people will be able to come and they can book a general type of consult or appointment with you. But if you need stuff that's a little more advanced, you want to also fully integrate it with your website then this is not going to be the solution for you. You'll want to go with a different type of calendar system. So let me know if you have any questions about anything that I may not have covered in here, but they, they've seemed to have added more functions as a standalone type system that wasn't there before when I did the last video. And it'll work for, for quite a few people, but again, you're going to quickly outgrow this if you're really doing a lot of consults and online bookings.