ARE YOU USING A PERSONAL PROFILE ON FACEBOOK TO PROMOTE BUSINESS, OR COMMUNITY GROUP

It’s really quite worrying that so many businesses, community groups and entrepreneurs out there have setup Facebook for their product/service as a personal profile. Whilst their heart is in the right place that mistake could very soon come back to bite them.

Over the past few years I’ve seen more and more people promote their businesses via personal profiles, this is when they setup a Facebook personal profile but instead of naming it as their name they change the name to their business name or even group name. Now whilst I understand that not everyone understands the internet the way we do the answers have always been out there and in fact Facebook has it’s very own help and support section that clearly has the how to information on there if you go look for it.

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These profile pages are also losing out to many different factors that the business pages have, lets have a look…

FB business page advantages:

Facebook Insights (statistics on clicks and so much more)
Facebook Shop (add your eCommerce products to your own FB shop)
Business pages look so much more professional
Lots of Tabs and Options
No limit to followers (profile only 5000)
Administration Controls (add multiple admins & editors etc)
Facebook advertising
Privacy – so much more control over your page with business
Call to Action Button (link to site, call now etc)
Contact info and web links
Schedule Posts (a great time management tool)
3rd Party apps (great for competitions, polls, more clicks & likes)
Business page is separate from your personal profile

I know there are more but these are the most popular for me and these get used daily, weekly, monthly.

BUSINESS PAGES ARE SEPARATE FROM PERSONAL

A lot of folk have asked me does my personal profile show up on a business page. The answer is no unless you like the page or post on the page via your personal profile. That’s another great feature of a business page. You promote your business or community page only. Your personal is kept private. People who like your business/community page won’t even know who your personal profile is unless you tell them or know them personally. Whilst I login via my personal username and password all my pages are on the left menu under pages on the timeline/feed.

PROFILE PAGES TO BE SHUT DOWN

What if you have been using Facebook via a personal profile page and you have built up 300 friends (not followers). These 300 people see your posts all the time and they often comment, share and even buy from you or attend your service. What if Facebook took those 300 people away?

Facebook have said that they will be shutting down personal profiles that advertise business or anything else that isn’t a real person. However the good news is that there is a process that can be applied to swap your profile across to a business page.

Don’t just take my word for it go and have a good read at these excellently put together blogs that explain what I have touched upon in more detail.

Check out this awesome infographic that explains things very clearly…