Do you use Facebook for your business?

Do you know the difference between a personal profile and a business page?

Do you ask people to be a friend to your business or to like your business?

Many small business owners are still setting up their business on a second Profile rather than a Facebook Page so here is a post to clarify!

What is a profile?

When you sign up to Facebook you create a personal profile and you invite “friends” to join you and become a friend with people. So far, so good right? But the problem comes when people set up a second profile for their small businesses. We still see this, so some people are not setting up their business right on Facebook.

According to Facebook, personal profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name. You are only allowed to hold one personal profile. If you set up your business as a second personal profile, you are contravening Facebook’s terms of service and they can shut your second profile (business) down at any time. If that happens you will lose all your “friends” and all the content on your second profile without any notice. If you think about it, when you are asking people to “friend” your business you are also asking them to allow you to access their holiday snapshots, check out their marital status and pry into their personal lives. It is not professional.

What are pages?

According to Facebook, pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook. Pages have number of advantages over profiles;

• They can be found by search engines. Your status on your Page is searchable too
• They can be seen by people not logged into Facebook
• They track user analytics so you can see how many people have seen your post and your response rate as well as tracking the activities of your page (page insights)
• You are unlimited by how many people can “like” your Page
• You can create widgets and like buttons that are easy to embed into your website and blog,  Facebook creates the code for you that you copy and paste into a widget on your website/blog
• You can set up additional Page admins to have access to managing your page without sharing passwords
• People who like your page can’t see the Page admins and they don’t have access to your personal account
• You can have as many pages as you want

We hope this post gave you some clarification on the difference. If you want to create a page on Facebook click here