If you originally set up your business as a Facebook personal profile you should consider converting to a business Page. Before making this conversion, consider the advantages and disadvantages from a business stand point.
Advantages of Converting
- Maintaining a profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content. (This should be reason enough!)
- Since profiles are for meant individual people, they aren’t suited to meet your business needs. Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures, which you can learn more about here.
- Migration will be especially useful for users who initially planned to use their profile to promote a small business, such as an event promotion company or consultancy, but eventually hit Facebook’s 5,000 friend limit.
- It will allow those promoting a business with a personal profile to begin using third-party Page applications that allow them to set up a Like-gated landing page, run contests, collect email addresses, and recreate functionality from websites.
- The Migration Tool also allows Facebook to gracefully shift users towards terms of service compliance, as representing a business or other non-human entity with a profile instead of a Page is prohibited.
Disadvantages of Converting
- At this time only your profile photo and friends will be moved to your new Page. No other content will be moved. You should download your account information to maintain your content.
- Converted Pages don’t appear in the interests section of users who were previously friends with the profile and were migrated, limiting the potential for the tool to be used for bait-and-switch. In some cases, users may receive a message informing them that one of their friendships has been converted to a “Like”.
- There is no way to convert a Page to a user profile, so users should be sure they want to migrate before doing so.
- They won’t be able to write on the walls of friends, see their updates in the news feed, or access their messages once they become a Page.
- Users won’t be able to register for a new account using any of the email addresses or phone number associated with their old profile.
- In some cases, the migration can cause a user’s Facebook vanity URL to longer work.
Summary
Overall, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. If you are using a Facebook personal profile for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures I would highly suggest that you convert your Facebook personal profile to a Facebook Business Page!
Make sure to read tomorrow’s blog post, “Nine Steps to Convert Your Facebook Personal Profile Into a Business Page“. I will share with you the detailed steps of how to make the conversion.
Recent Comments