Profile or Page when using Facebook?

I know people get confused about what the difference is when creating an account with Facebook.  They hear they need to get a Facebook Page for their business but then, in setting up, get confused as to which is which and what the differences are.

If you plan to use Facebook for your business, then you must set up a Page, not a Profile. The two most immediate differences are this:  Adding someone as a ‘Friend‘ or allowing people to ‘Like your Page‘.

If you use a personal profile for your business then people have to get permission from you to be added as a friend.  This can be a real pain in the proverbial if you get lots of requests and can’t keep up with them, but more to the point, once you have accepted someone as a friend, you get their updates on your wall. And this might not be a good thing for your ‘business profile’.

It makes far more sense to create a Facebook Page, where people can like your page without you having to approve it, and you don’t get all their chattering on your business page wall. There are other differences too, but for now, I wanted to highlight these two main differences. So, how can you tell if you’re in your page or profile? I get clients asking this also so thought I’d share it here.

Below are three images. The first one is my Facebook Profile. Note how it has the ‘Add Friend’ button below the cover picture. It also shows in the top right hand side what persona I’m in currently, i.e. my personal profile.

These next two pictures are of my Facebook Page for “A Clayton’s Secretary”.  You can see there is a Like button for people to like the page (and therefore receive updates on their wall) and it says how many Likes I have.  But I’m still in my personal profile persona when viewing this page.

If I want to post on other pages as my business persona, and not my personal one, I need to change my persona by clicking on Edit page and then choosing the last option in the drop down box ‘Use Facebook as….’ whatever your Facebook Page name is.  Once you do that you’ll see that the persona picture/name changes in the top right hand corner.  Note also the About information I have showing on my page.  It’s worth letting people know, at a glance, what your business is about.

I encourage my clients to use a personal/family photo of some sort on their personal profiles and a business photo or image for their Business Pages. This way it makes it easy for them to know immediately which persona they’re currently in when chatting on Facebook and connecting with other people.

Now, to clarify why I feel it’s important to have a Page versus a Profile for your business.  If you want other people to follow you, and they have chosen to keep their Facebook Profile as personal, private, for friends and family only (as I do), then you won’t be getting those people adding you as a friend if you have chosen to use your profile for your business. I won’t want you seeing what my nephew did last night when out with his mates, or what someone else had to say on my profile when joking around or discussing a family in-joke. Nor will I want anyone else who has become friends with you having access to view my profile (otherwise known as ‘friends of friends’). That doesn’t come across as very professional or business-like and I firmly believe that ‘personal’ and ‘business’ should be kept separate. It’s the reason why I don’t accept many friend requests – I have lots of colleagues that I am friends with, but only through business channels, and, so I keep my family and close friends separate to what I do in the business world online.

However, anyone can like your page and you don’t have to be involved to approve that. Next time you view your page you will get a notification icon showing in your Admin Panel to let you know of new likes and new comments and messages, but you won’t get emails or other notifications seeking permission to add someone.

There are a lot of other ‘controls’ you can access in the admin panel that allows you to set the settings you want as to whether people can post on your business page wall and what they can post (text, images, videos, etc), however I really just wanted to cover the bare basics here, as to why and when you would use a profile versus a page.

Finally, if this is all too much for you and you really don’t know what to do or how to do it, then contact me and I, or one of my social media savvy VA team members, will be in contact to see how we can help you.