Facebook Pages vs. Profiles – Are you asking too much of your customer?

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As a business owner in Prince George, BC , if you are at all confused about social networking for your business, you’re not alone. First off, it is constantly changing and it is hard to keep up… even for a Social Media Geek like myself.

One of the things I am still seeing a lot of in this city is a business starting up Facebook profile page instead of a business page. Last year in my video series, I went over why this was not a great idea, but I thought I’d share it again as I just got another “friend” request from a major player in town today.

The number one reason that businesses are shooting themselves in the foot with having the wrong type of page is that it is against Facebook’s Terms of Use. This means that you could build your business via a personal profile and it can be shutdown by Facebook and you could lose all your “friends”, photos and any info you may have on the account. What a waste that would be! Facebook ONLY allows profiles to be for individual people.

You could potentially “get away” with this if you are a consultant that operates under your own name. For example, my coaching business I operate under “Shauna Harper” and could potentially just have my profile vs. a business page. However, you will see in reason #2 why I started a business page.

The 2nd reason why having a business page is better = these pages were made specifically for business content and is visible to  Google (content of profile pages often aren’t due to privacy rules).

If you are business, you want your content to be indexed by Google. If you spend any money on advertising, you know how much it costs to get the word out there.

Google is one of the best ways to share information online. You want what you say on your wall… articles or information… to be indexed by Google. If you are a personal profile for your business,  only your name appears of Google, not the content of your page. Not only is Google locked out of content on personal pages, so are people searching the internet for your business.

Click here to view the business page of  a previous client of mine … you can navigate all her pages and see all the content whether you “like” this business page or not…whether you are logged into Facebook or not.  Now click here to take a look a profile of one of my assistants, you are actually locked out.

That means that if this was my business page, people have to request to be my “friend” (even if they aren’t my friend) to see info about my business. That leads us into the last point.

The third reason is that customers aren’t required give you access to their personal life. Your customers might not want to give you access to the pictures of their kids, what they did last Saturday or their family reunion coming up next month!

When they accept or request to be a “friend” with your business, they are opening up all that info to you. No matter how much they LOVE your business and want to have updates, they may not want to give you access to their personal lives.You are asking for too much private information from your client just to find out information about your business.

Hopefully you can see why changing over to a business page is beneficial to your business.

If you have less than 500 friends, I would highly suggest you start from scratch and just create a business page with your personal profile as the admin. It is easier to manage if you are already signing into your personal profile.

However, if you have over 500 friends, click here to read from Facebook how to turn your profile into a page and not lose any of your friends… instead it turns them into a someone that “likes” your page.

Would love to know what you think or if you have any questions. Please feel free to post below.

 

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  • Diana

    Thanks Shauna! Very helpful. I have been a personal FB user for many years but didn’t know the difference between creating a business page, etc.

  • Shauna Harper

    So glad you found this helpful. Many people are confused as FB has also changes their mind all the time. Keep this blog in your favorites as I will be posting a lot more of the next few weeks and months.