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Why you cannot use a facebook personal profile as a business page.

April 19th, 2011 | Posted by martinbrossman in Facebook

Martin BrossmanAnother question is: Why it does not help your business to use a personal profile as a business page.

First of all using a personal profile as a business page is against the Facebook terms of operation and may at sometime just be shut down with the loss of all  your “friends”. See Facebook’s terms of operation: https://www.facebook.com/terms.php
Here are a few of the statements from this page that relates to this:
– “You will not create more than one personal profile.”
– “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser)”

To understand the difference read what Facebook says about the difference between a personal and business page:
“What is the difference between a business account and a personal account?”
“Business accounts are designed for individuals who only want to use the site to administer Pages and their ad campaigns. For this reason, business accounts do not have the same functionality as personal accounts. Business accounts have limited access to information on the site. An individual with a business account can view all the Pages and Social Ads that they have created, however they will not be able to view the profiles of users on the site or other content on the site that does not live on the Pages they administer. In addition, business accounts cannot be found in search and cannot send or receive friend requests.”
– From Facebook (see link above)

The benefits of having a Facebook Business page:
– Business Pages allow an unlimited number of that can “like” the page while the personal has a cap at 5,000.
– Pages and posts from Business Pages are indexed by search engines like Google.
– You will be appropriate to your customers and not invading their personal space.
Remember they can be clicking ‘Hide’ and you don’t know it.
– You get more stats and info on which content is being viewed, shared and interacted with to produce better content (e.g. 784 Impressions 1.66% Feedback).
– Your FB business page interacts better with the FB paid ads.
– You don’t run the risk of just being shut down and losing all your contacts.
– You can have several administrators with out giving out your personal password.
– People can check out content on your page before they commit to being liking it.
– You don’t have to spend time approving people that want to ‘Like’ it but you still can remove post or ban people.
– A nice business “Like” button can be added to your business page that show people who are their friends already like you business page and other content.

How can you convert your Facebook personal profile to a Business Page?
Terry Crosby has done such a great job explaining it I am just posting the link to his page for you to read.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/facebooktutorials/facebook-now-allows-users-to-convert-their-personal-profile-into-a-business-page/

The other way is to create a business page off your real personal page (don’t worry all your content will be protected) by:
1) Sign-in under your personal page.
2) Go to: http://Facebook.com/Pages
3) Pick the best fit and set up your business page.
4) Sign back into the personal page that you used as a business page. Tell your “Friends” a number of times that you are moving over with a link to the new page. If they don’t follow then I will bet they are already ignoring the personal page that you used as a business page and don’t worry about it.
5) Have great content worth their attention.

Let me here from you? What have you learned?
– Martin Brossman NCSmallBusinessTraining.com
Here is my FB business profile if you liked this than please ‘like’ my page:
http://Facebook.com/MartinWBrossman

 

 

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