Facebook Business Page vs Personal Profile
Why should you have a Facebook Business Page as opposed to a Personal Profile for your business.
Yesterday morning I was giving a short talk at a local business meeting on the benefits of using Facebook to generate leads for local businesses. The question of Facebook Business Page vs Personal Profile to promote a business cropped up again.
Having created websites for some of the businesses, I am familiar with their on-line exploits. One business has/had several Facebook identities, not to cheat, but different people on different occasions had created a Facebook page for them.
Each page had slightly different page name and often different details. Well what is the harm?
There are several good reasons for not letting this happen:
- Imagine a potential customer comes across an abandoned profile, does this look good for your business?
- If you are cheating and trying to keep several pages going, your fan base is split and you have more work to do updating.
- Facebook regards itself as a social site with businesses a long way second. Once, and I say once not if, Facebook spots several profiles for the same company, they delete the whole lot, no warning, no questions, no come back, you were breaking their rules. You might cry unfair, but it is their site, you used/abused it for free, so no comeback.
And here is the lowdown on using a Personal Profile instead of a Facebook Business Page:
- Details on your personal profile are hidden unless being viewed by a logged in friend. Do you really want to force potential clients to login to Facebook and be your friend before they can read about you? Business pages can be read by anybody logged in or not.
- Personal profiles are locked (i.e not visible to the search engines), business pages are not. What good is a web page if it isn’t indexed.
- You can have only up to 5000 personal friends. The number of FANS on a Business Page is unlimited.
- Once logged in all your friends ( Business contacts/clients ) are visible to your competition.
- Using a Personal Profile for business is confusing. Are you trying to make Friends or Customers? Do you really think that your customers are interested that you watch Xposé or listen to Electric Penguins?
See examples of the 8 most common mistakes made using Facebook for business.
Creating your Facebook Business Page
If you are going to put the effort into using Facebook for business, create a Facebook Business Page.
A Facebook Business page is totally separate from your personal profile you just need a personal profile in order to be able to administer it. Other people can also be made administrators of the Business page, i.e. your secretary to do the updates or your web designer if you are wanting a customised look.
One caution, Facebook is not your website. You have some free pages on it. You have a limited set of rights. If Facebook take a dislike to you, your account may be shut down. Use Facebook to get fans, generate leads and feed visitors to your own website, don’t put all your business in someone else’s basket.
PS. Remember to update your Facebook Business Page to the new Timeline format before the change over to time-line at the end of March. Read here about the 2012 Facebook Changes and how they affect your business. If you need any help with creating or updating your Facebook page to the new format, contact us.
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can you take your personal page and add it to your business page and just use business page as primary page?
Hi Jo,
You cannot add your personal page to your business page, you can only convert your personal page to a business page or create a business page in addition to your personal profile page.
As per Facebook Rules: “When you convert your personal account to a Facebook Page, Facebook will transfer your current profile picture and add all your friends and subscribers as people who like your Page. Your account’s username will become the username for your Page, and the name associated with your personal account will become your Page’s name.” Here is the link to Facebook Rules regarding Converting Personal Page to a Business Page
However if you want your Page to have a different name, a better option is to create a new page. Also – none of your content will be transferred to the new business page. Information such as photo albums, profile information will not be transferred.Your comments, wall posts unfortunately will be gone forever.
I hope that helps….