Facebook Fan Pages Vs Personal Profiles

I’m currently working with a client to set up their online presence and something that came to my attention is that they have their business set up on Facebook as a personal or individual profile.  This is not the first time I’ve seen this.

A common question Entertainers ask me is what can they do about their personal profiles because they can no longer accept friend requests.

In both these instances having a personal/individual profile set up on Facebook is  not the best way to manage their online presence, so I thought I’d explain why you should amend this immediately and how you can change this to alleviate a lot of headaches and save you time and money.

Firstly it is against Facebook’s terms of service

According to Facebook’s terms of service, “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.”  If your business’ profile gets shut down by Facebook for violating this rule, your friends list will vanish with it.

Secondly you are a Business or Entertainer

As a business owner I would imagine that you are aiming to build and grow your business and you may be looking for joint venture opportunities, business partners, investors, sales consultants and media opportunities and maybe one day even franchise your business or possibly sell your business.   Having a good solid online presence that is done right will add alot of credibility and value to your business and your business will be seen as a business that is professional and knows what they are doing which ultimately builds trust and security.

As an entertainer you may be looking to align yourself with a brand, looking for sponsors and looking for more work in the area of enteraining.  Again by getting it right you will be demonstrating to your potential sponsors, the people you work for and media buyers that you take your brand seriously.

Growing your audience

One of the major setbacks with personal profiles is, no LIKE button, this can be quite detrimental to growing your audience on Facebook. Someone has to personal send a friend request rather than like the page. The internet audience are generally lazy, if you give them too many things to do to gain access to you, you are going to lose their interest and they will head of somewhere else.

Fan pages offer Analytics

Fan pages offer analytics about your audience, you can view all types of data about user activity such as demographic break-downs, how many likes, comments, gender.

Limitations

There is a limit of 5,000 friends that you can have on your personal profile page.  A fan page is unlimited.

Entertainers will easily relate to this because a number of them have multiple profiles set up on Facebook and this can be a nightmare to manage.

How do you convert your current profile to a fan page

Fortunately Facebook now provides the means for you to do this. There are some things you need to be aware of when you do convert but I highly recommend that you do especially if you are a franchise.  Here is the link which gives you step by step instructions on how to do this.