Facebook's profile vs page, which is right for your business?
Written on the 11 April 2013 by Sara Kirkby
0721
Founded in 2004 Facebook started out as a social network, with more than 800million active users worldwide including 10million Australian users, it’s not hard to see the opportunity for business to connect their it’s customers.
So Facebook launched ‘Pages’ for businesses and assigned ‘Profiles’ to users. This left many new users confused about whether they should build a page or profile and left existing users unsure of how or why they should migrate their existing profile into a business page.
To resolve this issue Facebook recently launched a migration tool which allows user to convert a Facebook profile into an official business page, simply transforming ‘friends’ into ‘likes’.
Why should I convert my profile to a Page?
Facebook profiles are meant for individual people, they aren't suited to meet business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organisations, businesses, brands, and public figures.
Maintaining a Facebook profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content. Can you afford to lose all your followers and start from scratch again?
Now, later or never?
The most important point you need to be aware of is that you should be 100% sure you want to make the chance. There’s no Undo button, so be sure you have back up of your profile, and it’s essential to be well aware of all the pros and cons associated with merging before taking the plunge. Having said all that if you decide not to convert now, you can always reconsider your decision at a later stage.
Pros
• Comply with the rules – Eliminate risk of Facebook removing your Facebook presence.
• Additional privacy – Only administrators of the page can see the names of the people following the page, this is not available for the public to see. Therefore admins can remove unwanted likes
• Keep your followers – If you chose to migrate, all your friends are converted to ‘Likes’. This is a huge bonus as you don’t need to start from scratch to build a fan base for your business.
• Strong branding – A Facebook business page serves as a legitimate platform for your business and offers a number of ways to customized your business page
Cons
• No more friends – Once you migrate, you can’t add or accept friends. If a Facebook user wants to get associated with your page, they have to become a fan.
• Profile Data – If you migrate, you lose all profile data. That’s way it’s essential to back up your profile first!
• No Chat – Pages don’t have the chat facility, however you are still able to interact with customers on the wall by posting questions, responding to comments and sharing interesting a relevant content to start conversations within your community
Back up your profile
It is essential to back up your profile to ensure you always have a copy of the content your sharing. Here’s how to back up your Facebook profile:
• Click the account menu at the top right of any Facebook page
• Choose “Account Settings”
• Click on "Download a copy" of your Facebook data
Then click the Download button on the following page. From there if you would like to convert your Facebook profile to a page, use the Facebook migration tool and follow the prompts.
My advice:
Facebook changes frequently therefore I recommend migrating any profiles used for business purposes into pages as soon as possible to take advantage of some great free marketing tools the pages offer. Some of the key features on pages include, customer check-in, see traffic reports, manage the administrators of the page, integrate the page with your website and tap into Facebook extensive how to guides and support on how to successfully market your business using Facebook.
