Silly Rabbit: Facebook Profiles are for People
| Diane Vautier September 9, 2009 |
   |
If you’re one of the 300 million people worldwide who has set up a Facebook profile then you’re connected to one of the largest Social Media platforms on the planet. You’re catching up with old friends from high school, college, with neighbors and even long lost cousins living all the way across the country. It’s a lot of fun and an easy way to stay in touch.
But if you’re a business and you have a Facebook profile, then you may need to reconsider just how savvy you are in the Social Media scene. For a business, a Facebook fan page rather than a profile is a more appropriate option.
You see, silly rabbit, Facebook profiles are for people, not companies.
“What’s the big deal” you may ask? “Profile or page, it’s all the same and my information is out there for the world to see. Don’t sweat the details.” While it’s true that the information is there and available for consumption, there are several challenges you may want to consider before digging in your heels on the idea of a profile.
Here are the top 5 reasons you should use a Facebook fan page for a business, not a Facebook profile:
1. Control. First, and not small by any measurement is the fact that profiles are operated by an individual. Now if you happen to be the owner of the small business, this may not seem like a big concern, but let’s say an employee volunteered to set up a profile for you and then six months later she leaves for a different job or worse yet, is fired. That profile travels with that individual and you’ve just let your hard earned reputation and brand walk out the door with her. A Facebook fan page on the other hand allows you to assign more than one administrator to the account so that even if your employee isn’t with the company anymore, the company still maintains control of the page.
2. Voice. As a profile, you represent yourself. “Hi this is Chuck, you may know me as “Chucky” and remember that I like to snow shoe and watch baseball. Hey dude, what’s shakin’?” Communication from a Facebook fan page comes from the company, also known as your brand, not one individual. With multiple administrators, you’re able to set the tone and guidelines for sharing posts to ensure your brand and reputation remain in tact. You’re able to maintain the voice of your brand, loud and clear.
3. Functionality. Also a big concern is that quite frankly a page and a profile operate differently with slightly different features. Facebook understood the differences between the needs of a person and those of a company, and painstakingly designed pages to be appropriate for each.
Given the wide acceptance of Facebook and the frequency of feature updates, it’s likely that Facebook will continue to revise their programming in response to individual and business user requests in different ways. New software updates may diverge even more than they do now, with specific promotional functions being available to company pages that may not be available to individual profiles. And if you’re a profile, not a page, updates that may be useful, may not be available to you.
4. Migration. Equally important is the difficulty in migration from a profile to a page. Today you may have only a few hundred followers which is a manageable number of ‘friends’, but in a year’s time when you’ve realized the structure of your Facebook presence needs to be converted to a business page with ‘fans’, moving friends from your profile to fans of a page may be more difficult of a task, running the risk of losing connections during the transition.
5. Facebook Prohibits It. The last, and most important reason businesses should use pages instead of profiles is because Facebook prohibits businesses from using personal features for promotion.
Quoting directly from the Facebook Help Center they say:
“All personal site features, such as friending and messaging, are also for personal use only and may not be used for professional promotion. If you add a user as a friend, for example, this person will be invited to be a friend of your profile and not your Page. Using personal site features for professional promotion, or creating unauthorized Pages, may result in your account being warned or disabled.”
Our suggestion is to give your company a solid foundation with a Facebook page and use the profile for yourself. You’ll find you’ll be able to maintain control over the page, give your brand a voice, take advantage of business functions and eliminate the need for costly migration to the proper platform. And, you won’t be banned from Facebook.
Marketing, social media | Diane Vautier | 
2:44 pm
