Should I use my personal Facebook profile as a business tool?

Facebook has a reputation for being the place that you go to share the minute details of your life with the people you went to highschool with (whether or not you ever had had any desire to reconnect with those people in the first place.) But is that really what it is and is it a place you should be connecting with people for business?

Facebook is different for everyone

How I use my personal Facebook profile and how you use it are probably very different. Some share very personal information, some are very private and don’t want everyone seeing photos of their families, and some will say anything and everything and don’t care who knows.

My belief is that no matter where you are posting, you shouldn’t post information online that you aren’t comfortable with everyone (including your mother and your kids when they are adults) seeing.

This means that although I post personal information on my Facebook profile, it isn’t information I worry about others seeing. When people request to be my friend on Facebook *I* generally say yes. 

Connecting via your personal Facebook profile

Do I recommend that you connect with everyone on your personal profile? Do I think there’s a value?

There really isn’t a clear answer so here are a few points to remember about personal profiles:

- You can have a maximum of 5000 friends. Though this isn’t a problem for me now, some can hit the maximum amount so would need to pick and choose who they let in.

- There is a subscribe function which allows people to see your public updates in their feed without seeing the more personal information you don’t want everyone knowing about. You can always tell people you don’t know well that they should subscribe to you instead of friending you.

- Social media is about building relationships.  I build the strongest relationships on Facebook.

- Pages are a much better way of interacting with your client base as a business. Profiles are about you. 

What should you do?

Think about why you would or wouldn’t connect on Facebook and know that there will be people who will try to friend you on Facebook regardless of what you’d prefer.  

Once you’ve figured out if there is any value in being friends with people who aren’t actually your friends and if you decide if you feel comfortable with letting people into your inner Facebook world you’ll know what the right decision is for you.

Let’s connect!

Come connect with me on Facebook now. You can subscribe to my public Facebook updates, you can add me as a friend and I’ll probably friend you back if you tell me it’s because you read this post, and most definitely go like the Wellman Wilson Consulting and sign up to our newsletter for more tips and tricks when it comes to social media!

Then leave a comment letting me know if you connect with people you meet for your business with your personal Facebook account.

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5 Reasons a Facebook Business Page is Better than a Profile

 

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook is a great way to share information about your business in a place that many members of your

audience are visiting on a daily basis.  With over 800 million users, half of those logging in daily, Facebook is a must for almost any business.

I have encountered many businesses who have a Facebook profile instead of a page for their business - some because they set them up before Facebook pages even came in to creation, some because they worry about linking their personal profile to the business page (this isn’t a concern, once your page is set up, nobody can see who the administrator is).

Here are 5 reasons why you should have a page instead of a profile for your business.

 

1. Facebook doesn’t want you to have a profile for your business

Having a profile for a business is against Facebook regulations. The chances of Facebook ever realizing you’re doing this isn’t particularly high BUT if they do, they could delete the account.

2. People don’t want you to know about them

People worry about their privacy.  They don’t want people they don’t know seeing what they’re saying on Facebook; they don’t want to worry that their private information is being shared with others.

When you have a business set up as a profile instead of a page you are asking people to “friend” you.  That means that you have access to their private information.  That will immediately cut out a large number of people who simply don’t want to be friends with your business.

When people need to friend you they also can’t see any of your information until you have accepted them, which brings me to my next point.

3. Immediate access

There is no approval process for a page.  Once someone likes you they have total access to your page. The less barriers the better.

4. Easy to promote on other sites

People won’t like your Facebook page if you don’t holler from the rooftops that you have one.  Tell people at every opportunity - in your newsletter, links from twitter and especially on your web site and blog.

You can install a widget that goes on your site or blog that lets people like your page without ever leaving your site - the easier it is for someone to like your page the higher the chance they’ll do it.  This makes it very easy for them and isn’t hard to install.   (You can’t do this for a profile.)

5. Insights

It can be hard to measure the return on investment of social media sometimes, but there are certainly a lot of ways to see what’s going on on your page using Facebook Insights.

Insights lets you see how people are interacting with your page and figure out what content is getting a lot of engagement. It lets you see how many new people have liked you in a week, and where they’re coming from. It is a great tool to use to measure Facebook Page success and help you plan your future content.

Converting a profile to a page

If you have a Facebook profile for your account don’t worry, you can switch it to page.  Unfortunately if you have a Facebook profile AND a Facebook page it’s not easy to merge the two.

Here is a good article from Mashable on how to convert your profile to a page.