Many people may not realize it, but there are two primary kinds of Facebook profiles you can have; a personal profile, meant for an individual person and a Facebook page, meant for a business, organization, or public personality. Many times, I have seen personal profiles created which should have been created as a Facebook page.
This article will help show you why you shouldn't do that, and what to do if you already have.
Why is This a Bad Thing?
Facebook pages are designed specifically for businesses and organizations. They work differently in some key ways as a result. Those differences will tend to make it harder for people to connect with your business if you run it through a personal profile.
- Personal Profiles connect via 'Friends', while Pages connect via 'Likes'. On a Facebook Page, interested parties can simply click the "Like" button to start following you. Personal profiles, on the other hand, are made to give you more control over who has access. So people send you 'friend requests', which you have to approve. This is a needless hurdle for a profile meant to be public.
- Pages allow you more options for creating engaging content. With a Facebook Page, you can create individual tabs using FBML, a subset of HTML that you can use to customize page promotions and other special information. You can integrate Facebook applications, RSS/XML feeds, and lots of other options that simply don't exist for personal pages, or which require the other user also to have an application installed.
- Pages have a built-in system for Facebook ads. You can easily create a Facebook ad for your page to promote it. No such easy system exists for personal profiles.
- Personal Profiles are referred to in verbiage that suggests they are an individual person. Personal profiles have fields asking specifically for your first name, last name, nickname, etc. This does not fit most business names, and can result in your business name looking strange in people's timeline. Facebook Pages' names, on the other hand, allow a free-form field, and your business name is put in verbiage which does not make it sound like it's an individual person.
- Facebook Pages let you define multiple admins, each tied to their own login. A Facebook page is still tied to at least one personal profile, who is the admin. If you need more people to keep tabs on your page, you can add other people to the list of admins, while still keeping your personal profile safe.
- Facebook might delete your personal profile, if it's not for an actual person. According to the FB terms of service, they can actually delete your personal profile if it is not created for a real, individual person. Now, I doubt they will actually be doing that any time soon, but it's a good idea to stay in compliance with FB's terms of service.
- Savvy Facebook users know the difference. You created a Facebook profile for your business to get the word out about your business; don't have it needlessly scream, "I don't really know how to use this Facebook stuff very well."
- Personal Profiles have built-in limits on Friends. Pages have no such limits on Likes. Many people who created 'business' profiles before Pages were available, or who started using their personal profile in a way more in keeping with how a business would, quickly hit the Facebook friends limits. Once you reach so many friends, your account is throttled, such that you can only accept so many friends over a certain period of time. This can be devastating.
It's OK; You Can Fix It
Facebook actually has a tool to allow you to convert your Facebook personal profile into a Facebook Page. The tool will automatically convert your Facebook Friends into Likes on your new page, and your profile's photos will be transferred. However, according to the help information on the tool, no other profile information will be transferred. Still, it is very much worthwhile to do it, and Facebook has some tools you can use to retrieve your other profile information.
One of the key things you should do before converting is to use a tool FB offers to download your timeline. You can then repost things that you wish to repost.
Facebook Link: Converting your profile into a Page
Need Help?
If reading over the page linked above scares you, you should definitely get some help. We can get you in touch with people who can help, if need be. Contact me at Inkwell::Data's Facebook page, here.