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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.

Ever since I discovered there were applications you could use to schedule tweets I’ve been a big believer that this is a great way to promote content.

Scott Stratten, possibly better known at @unmarketing, disagrees. Disagrees in a big way too - he doesn’t think you should ever schedule tweets. And Scott knows a lot about social media. I’ve read his book and I respect him and his ideas so when he kept saying “scheduling tweets is bad” I started to think about it a lot more.

The more I thought about it, the more he convinced me to a certain degree, and the more I disagreed to another.

Since hearing him make his point (which is that Twitter is like networking and you wouldn’t send a flyer or a preprogrammed recording of your voice to a networking event) I’ve started changing my practices.

Whereas before I happily scheduled about five tweets throughout the day on a subject (perhaps a new blog post) I now rarely schedule more than 2-3 tweets in a day, usually no more than 2 on the same subject. The rest of the time I rely on being on twitter to pass along my message.

I’ve done this to decrease the chances of seeming like I’m spamming people or misleading people into thinking I’m online when I’m not. But that being said, I really believe that although twitter is about networking and engaging, people expect a certain amount of plain out information sharing. I think that I can remind readers once a week by scheduled tweet that I have a facebook page or a newsletter I would love for them to know about. I think that I can schedule a couple of tweets for times I won’t be online to hit more of my audience about a new blog post I hope they will be interested in reading.

But what do you think? Do you schedule tweets? How often? Does it bother you to see tweets repeated?