Personal Facebook Page v Business Fan Page
Social Media MarketingBy Joanna Fletcher
Now that all your friends, your mom and your grandma, are on Facebook, there is more reason than ever to use it in your marketing campaign. Facebook administration has recognized this opportunity and continued to refine its Page’s utility.
Promotional Pages
A Facebook Page can be created only by an official representative of the business/person in question, and it is a great way to distribute information to all people who have chosen to be Fans of the business. You can post the latest and greatest news, and your fans can comment on posts, interacting with each other by way of their connection to you. Pretty powerful stuff.
Profile Connections
But many people can attest to the value of using their own personal profile page as a way to promote a business. The first sparks of a business are usually personal; one person with a dream and the will to bring it to life. At this embryonic stage, the encouragement and patronage of family and friends is crucial.
Growing into Your Fans
As the business grows beyond this base, a page becomes more useful. Your business, while still very much your baby, is getting its own brand identity. A page allows you to present your logo and links to fans every time they get an update in their news feed. More important, you can present special offers and discounts to those who have chosen to support you, a very economical way of creating a loyalty program.
Page Positives
Separating your business identity from your personal identity is hard for many entrepreneurs but is necessary, especially as the enterprise grows to include employees, partners, and complaints departments. A personal profile can be hacked more easily than a page, and it needs to remain your personal space.
Pages can be administered by anyone with the authorization and are not dependent on your personal account information. This is very useful if you need to be away from your business for any reason. Trust is built and maintained when the page is consistently updated and available, even if you are in the Bahamas for two well-deserved weeks.
Page Negatives
One worry that arises as your business grows is the 50-Page limit. People can be fans of only 50 Pages at the same time, while they can have up to 5,000 friends. By using your Profile to promote your business, there may be less chance of having your connection severed due to space concerns. If you do use your personal profile as a portal to your business, you will have to start accepting friend requests from people who have less personal connection with you and may have ulterior motives.
So which is better, a personal Facebook page or a business fan page? It depends on the stage your business has reached, your comfort with negotiating Facebook’s complex security systems and as always, your customers’ preferences.
About the Author
Joanna Fletcher is a netizen who has lived, worked, and played online for most of her life. Her entrepreneurial flair is topped only by her tolerance for failure.
How do I post to other people’s walls as a friend but not concerning business. If I post, my personal life gets shared and not my business.
Facebook doesn’t allow a business identity. How do I tag my business onto my personal identity and post to a wall without having it confused with my personal identity. This is REALLY irritating when it comes to my news feeds which are just about useless now because facebook took my personal information and started sending me all this information I did NOT want to read about.
Any advice or resources would be appreciated.
Thank you for your question, Cheryl. It sounds to me like you need to create two pages to keep your personal and business identities separate.
One is a fan page for your business, which you can create here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. On this page you can post news about your business and offer discounts to fans and communicate with clients, vendors and customers.
The other is a personal page where you can communicate your friends and family without clients and customers having access to this information.
How do I stop my posts on page going to personal page - good deal of friends and fans are same so they get post twice
Before, Facebook allowed you to mouse over a particular post and click “don’t show” all posts from that source (e.g., your page or friends), but this feature seems to be no longer available.
You can choose to not follow your own page, thereby not getting posts from it on your personal page, or you’ll have to manually remove it on your personal page whenever they appear. More information can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=820
I am the administrator of a fan page. I wish to post on other facebook pages as that fan page and not my personal self.How do I do that?
I did a little digging on this and it looks like Facebook doesn’t currently have this worked out. You might want to join the rally of Page Admins who are trying to get Facebook to notice this need and implement it here: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=10381469571&topic=9204#topic_top