In this 2024 tutorial, Shaun Whynacht walks viewers through the updated process for setting up and managing Facebook (Meta) appointment scheduling. He shows that the appointment tool is no longer found in page settings but inside Meta Business Suite under All Tools → Sell products and services → Appointments. The video covers connecting a Google Calendar, manually creating appointments, and the full suite of settings: defining weekly availability, toggling online booking to display a "Book Now" button on the Facebook page, setting the correct time zone, requiring appointment approval, handling double‑booking, configuring advanced booking windows (earliest and latest days in advance), and choosing the start‑time display interval (e.g., hourly). Shaun explains best‑practice recommendations such as using hour‑long slots to avoid confusion, limiting the booking window to 2‑3 weeks for professional services, and notes that the feature does not support payment collection. Finally, he demonstrates how to add the Facebook Scheduling Tool as the page’s action button, and invites viewers to ask questions in the comments.
Chapters
Hey everyone, this is my annual update to the Facebook appointment setting. This is one of the top videos that we've had over the last couple years, and then obviously things change and we had a couple comments, people asking for an updated version because the 2023 video isn't showing things that are there now or things are missing. So let's take a look at how we go about doing this. I'm just going to move my recording buttons out of the way. So here we are. This is our company page. So I just wanted to start from this point, um, and point out that even if you go to your settings in here, and even if you go to your new page experience settings, you're not going to find anything related to appointments here. Um, now how do you get to that? Well, great question. So what we're going to do is we're going to go back to the page. And you're going to go into your Meta Business Suite. Um, and that is where this is being housed now. So on the left-hand side, you're still not going to see appointments here. You're going to click on all tools. And then when you do that, then all the Meta Business Suite tools pop out here, but you're going to look under sell products and services and there it is, appointments. So we're going to click on that and we're going to dive into what is in here. So we'll start at the top of the menu on the left, which is the calendar. So this is going to show you your calendar, anything that is, that is in it here. So it's linked to your calendar. Now, if you have never set this up, when you get into here, you'll be able to connect your Google Calendar to this. The next tab is any appointments. Now, keeping in mind, I don't use this for my appointments. I have my own CRM called clientconnector.app that I use, and it's all marketing automation, has my own calendar in it. So you can manually go in here and click create appointment, in which case you can then put in the customer's name, any of the services that you have, and then the start and end time and any notes here and hit create. So I can go in there manually. You're also gonna see options for any requests that come through. So when people request an appointment, if you set it up that way, confirmed or archived appointments in here. So here's a couple from way back, um, when I was playing with this. Now we're gonna get into the real bread and butter, which is the settings. So first off, you've got your availability. Now keeping in mind, this is what you need to think about. Your availability is the windows of time through the week that you want your calendar to look at your connected calendar and say, is there time available here? So in this example, what I have set here is on Wednesdays from 9 AM to 5 PM, on Thursdays from 9 AM to 11, and then taking 11 to 1 off, and then 1 to 5. This is obviously set up from the last time I did it. If you want to change and say, okay, I want to make Mondays available, you can go in here and click Add Times and you pick your time. So if it's like 9 to 5, or maybe you're gonna go 9 to 3 on that day, you can do that. If you want to split the day like this, you click Add Times and you can split and put another one in here. Okay, so that is how you add the times into those dates. I'm just gonna click Save on that. Now what it will do is it will go ahead and look at 9 to 3 on Monday, but if you have that day booked in your calendar, it's not gonna allow people to book in there. So that's how that works. Next is the online booking. So if this is turned off, it's not going to show up on your Facebook page. It's just going to be turned off here. If you click it on, then it's going to appear with a Book Now button on your page. Okay, next is your— don't do that— next is your time zone. So you're going to pick your time zone so that it's showing the times in the right time zone for you and those that come there. Now, keeping in mind with that also, if your time zone is, in this case, Atlantic for us, and Pacific is 4 hours difference, if we have, let's say, a, you know, 9 o'clock available on our time zone in the morning, that's going to be like 5 o'clock on Pacific time AM, right? So most likely nobody's going to book that. So that it will shift for the time zone that the person is in. Next, we've got appointment approval. So remember when we showed you up on the appointments, we've got, um, your calendar and then requested. If you require approval, it means that people can request the appointment and they don't actually get confirmation of it until you go in and say confirmed. So that is what that means. Double booking, so customers can request appointment times that are already booked. You can require approvals to confirm the request by turning on the approval. So if you want to allow people to book in the same times, I'm not sure why you would want that in that use case. For most people that are doing this, they're solo or they're— they have their own personal accounts here. So, but if you did, if you were going to walk on the wild side, you would turn that on. Now keeping in mind, you would want to turn on the approval on the other page here because you don't want that double booking to automatically approve. And it might be that maybe you get a lot of no-shows or cancellations, so you want to allow that time. Advanced bookings— so this is a great setting. This means that when is the soonest somebody can book, which means if I set this to 1 day Drop down. It means that if I hit your calendar today, it's not going to show me anything available today. Even if you have availability today, it's only going to show me from tomorrow onward. And the second one about how far in advance can people book, that is just as it says, 90 days, 30 days in advance. So you don't want people to book like, you know, like a year down the road. So you're kind of limiting that window. Now when we're doing professional coaching services and what we recommend for that is that people set maybe a 2 to 3 week window because we want people to take action that are serious when they're booking with you. And the start time display, this means when do you want people to be able to book in. So commonly we would do every 60 minutes, so top of the hour. If you did 30 minutes, it means that they could book at like 1:30, 2:30. This is, this is important. What I found personally sometimes is, you know, when people are booking in the half hours and the 15 minutes, and then you're looking at your, your Google Calendar in a kind of compressed view, you kind of get a false sense of when that starts. And I've missed a couple appointments that time because they were booked at like 1:45, and I looked at it and was like, okay, that's at 2:00, just because I didn't dive in in deep detail. So I say start with your 60 minutes at the top of the hour, and that will help you. If you need more time, you can always change those out. And then once you're done, you're going to click save. Now, a couple questions that came up in the comments of the last 2 years was, can I take payments for appointments? No, no, you can't. It doesn't have that functionality of being able to take payments in here. If you turned on your online booking here, and we're just gonna save that. What that means is when you go back to your page, let's just go back here. Boom, boom, boom. Let's go edit Facebook page. Nope, nope, that maybe we do. Maybe they moved it into here. Uh, no, they did not. Okay, let's just go back to our main page here. I'll make this easy. Oh, it's over here. So we're gonna refresh this. And what you're gonna want to do is your action button here. So your action button, it shows up if we change that button. There should be— that's reservation— book now. So connect a scheduling tool so you can book appointments. So we're gonna click on that one, we're gonna click next. There we go. And it will show up here as the Facebook scheduling tool versus connecting another tool that's here. Here. Uh, so in our case, because we have another outside tool, we could go in here and integrate any one of these that are here. Um, but we don't have the book now option set up for ours. We have, um, just a message button. So that is how you go ahead and do that. So just to recap on that, you're gonna go back to your page once you've turned it on in the business settings over here. So you're gonna go to all tools, appointments, settings, online booking, turn it on. Okay, once it's turned on, you come back to your page, click these three dots here, click Edit Action Button, Change Button, Book Now, Next, and then Use the Facebook Scheduling Tool that's here. Then click Finish, and then it will appear as the button on your page. So if you have any questions about this version of the 2024, how to use the booking feature of Facebook, please leave it in the comments just like before, and I'll do my best to answer those questions. Always click like, subscribe, and have a great day growing your business.
