Nothing personal, but Facebook Pages are all business

I recently returned from a training session with a client who is well on her way to a great new internet presence. However, she almost made a mistake that could have really been aggravating for her and maybe even have turned her off from her new-found social media enthusiasm.

Facebook personal vs business pages for your small business.

Facebook personal vs business pages for your small business.

She was talked into creating a “Personal” Facebook profile to represent her business. I did talk her out of it, but on my way home from that meeting I thought of all of the other arguments I should have made. She had caught me by surprise, so I wasn’t prepared with all of my professional objections because I hadn’t really thought about it for a while.

I got some of it right. But here’s EVERYTHING I should have told her…

Difference between Business Fan page and signing up your business using a personal profile

Most importantly! (Yes! I used an exclamation mark!) It’s against Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. According to the SRR, “profiles must represent an individual.”(And check out section 4)

That should be good enough for most people because you could get your page kicked off Facebook. (which I’ve seen happen) Then you’d try to face a faceless monstrosity when trying to defend yourself…against …uh…Facebook.

So you think you can fly under the radar and you want to do it anyways.

There are actually strategic reasons not to use a personal profile as a business page.

Here’s the second most important and the biggest difference between the two.

Personal Profile: You are limited to the speed your page is allowed to gain “friends” and there is a limit to the total amount of friends you can have.
Business Page: You can have an unlimited amount of followers and grow as quickly as you can.

As a personal page, you would need to accept all friend requests. How many times a day will you want to do that? I am an administrator on a page with nearly 17,000 followers and we can gain from 15 to 30 likes on a good day. Neither of those numbers would be allowed if your business was set up as a personal page.

Using a Business page rather than a Personal profile on Facebook also earns you extra Search Engine Optimization Points. For instance the “Category Field” is often overlooked when signing up for a page but it is important for mobile searches. (According to a Constant Contact Blog on SM & SEO.) Your page content will seem more relevant to the search engines when there is an account attached to a website. More of these details will be discussed in a future blog post.

Another overlooked factor is that you can’t gather any kind of analytics using a personal profile as a business page. There just isn’t anywhere to get the statistics you want and need to make decisions about your page.

And the absolute authority on it is Facebook itself. Facebook says so.

The Bone
Save yourself the aggravation of either losing your business page that is set up as a personal profile because Facebook took it away, or having to eventually switch it over because you’ve reached your maximum capacity of friends.

And that would be a GOOD problem to have.