When the first wave of popularity for conducting business on Facebook swept through, many entrepreneurs rushed to set up pages for their businesses. These pages required a user profile to manage them, resulting in many businesses ending up with both profile and business pages.
If you’re running your business on a Facebook profile page, or on both profile and business pages, you may want to reconsider. Although largely ignored, and rarely enforced, Facebook policy states businesses are not permitted to operate under a profile name. Aside from needing to comply with this lackadaisical policy, it’s difficult to manage both pages. It requires twice as much work, and if the same information is posted on both pages, the audience can end up with duplicate posts in their news feeds.
To determine the best option for your business let’s take a look at a few of the differences between profile and business pages.
Profile pages are managed by one user, you connect with other users via a “friend request” and updates are distributed to selected friends or posted for all registered Facebook users to see. Unless you adjust privacy settings, friending a business grants it access to all your status updates.
Profile pages are limited to 5,000 friends, which is out of most people’s reach, however for a larger business it’s favourable to have 5,000, or more, likes.
Business pages can be managed by several users. Profile users can “like” a business page to receive updates in their newsfeed, however a business cannot view updates from users who’ve liked their page. Once a business has gained more than 30 likes on their page they have access to Facebook Insights, (statistics on users’ interactions with their page).
If you’re currently running a business on both profile and business pages, your best route is to merge the two. Facebook allows you to convert your profile into a business page, turning all your current “friends” into “likes.” Once the profile page is converted, the two business pages and their associated “likes” also merge together leaving you with one business page and more likes
There are a few tricks to getting this process correct, and it’s not always as smooth as it should be, but once the merge has taken place you’ll only have to worry about managing one profile, giving you more time to focus on other projects.
