Facebook Page or Facebook Profile??

“Why can’t I use my Facebook personal profile page for my business?  I’ve been asked this many times and the simplest answer is…. Facebook says no.  That’s right…according to their Terms of Service it’s a no-no.

“Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. You may only create Facebook Pages to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative.”

“Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information in an official, public manner to people who choose to connect with them. Similar to profiles, Pages can be enhanced with applications that help the entity communicate and engage with their audiences, and capture new audiences virally through friend recommendations, News Feed stories, Facebook events, and beyond.”  From Facebook FAQ’s

I know, I hear so many people say “well others do it all the time.”  Yes, they do. But have you ever said to your kids, who use that excuse all of the time, “if so and so jumped off a bridge, would you follow?”.  Just because someone else is doing it doesn’t make it right.  Like it or not, this is the Facebook way of doing things.

So, a Page is Better. Why?

Let’s go beyond the fact that Facebook says no.  There are other good reasons why you shouldn’t do it and why creating an actual page is better for business.

• Pages can have unlimited Fans or Likes

We want our business to grow. Do we really want to limit our exposure to only 5,000 people on our friend page? Just this past week, someone I know who was doing business on their friend page, reached the 5000 limit.  All of a sudden he was trying to convince everyone to move to his new Business page.  Did they all go?  Who knows…but the time he’s spending building a new page and trying to convince friends to follow or  ”Like” the new page is time he could spend doing something more productive. He actually lucked out because the friend page was using his actual name and tougher for Facebook to realize he was not following the Terms of Service.  He could have gotten up one morning to find the entire page gone. Yes, they can do that and they don’t notify you prior to doing it. Imagine losing all of those friends and work, meaning no way to contact them to join your new page. What a colossal waste of time and energy.

• Pages have analytics, profiles do not offer analytics.

How will you know what working or what’s not working if you don’t use analytics of some sort?  Facebook Insights may not be the best but you can view all kinds of useful data about user activity on your page, including how many likes and comments you received each day, demographic break-downs and much more. This type of data can be really useful for understanding your customer base, and knowing which wall posts get the best reaction. Again, this data is not available to individual profiles.

• You can also embed a Like button and other applications into your own site.

This cannot be done on personal profiles and can be a major boost for businesses hoping to grow their audience on Facebook.

• Facebook pages are searchable!

Since pages are not behind the login, so they can be directly accessed whether the visitor has a Facebook account or not. Personal profiles are not searchable. This is important if you really want your Facebook page to be of any value.

• You can send “updates to fans”. whenever you want.

What a great way building a database of interested users. Send messages about new products, updated websites, etc.

• Third party applications are available on a “Page” while not on a personal profile.

There are so many of them that I’m not going to be going into them in this post. Instead, I will be doing a series of posts over the coming months to cover some key applications.

But, I don’t Want a Personal Page

Of course, the next comment is “I don’t want a personal page.”  Well, I guess you need to get over it IF you want your Facebook marketing to be successful.  Your privacy settings can be set so that no one but those you choose will know you have a personal page. Or lock your settings down so that no one can even find your personal profile. Yes, Facebook does offer a business page without a personal profile page but it doesn’t get searched so why bother? You also can’t view the profiles of users on the site.  Learn more here

It Boils Down to This

If you want  Facebook to be successful for your business, create a page. Don’t use your personal profile page to do so. If you don’t care that it could get shut down with no notice and you lose all of your work, then go for it.

So, which do you choose?

to talk about a Facebook or Social Media strategy.

Related posts:

1. The Key to Networking Success is Follow_up
2. Are You Going Local?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 8:36 am and is filed under Facebook, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.