Be a Business, Not a Friend
As Social Media outlets continue to grow, more and more businesses are getting into the act. This is a great thing. It’s truly a necessary part of your online marketing strategy. You can gain website traffic and thus new customers from your Social Media efforts.
BUT…
It’s important to remember that you should set up a Facebook PAGE for your business, not a profile. Profiles are for individuals. Individuals can be friends with people, businesses cannot – per Facebook’s Terms of Use:
Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual. Organizations of any type are not permitted to maintain an account under the name of their organization. We have created Facebook Pages to allow organizations to have a presence on Facebook. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from user profiles, and optimized for an organization’s needs to communicate, distribute information/content, engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fan’s recommendations to their friends. Facebook Pages are designed to be a media rich, valuable presence for any artist, business or brand.
If you create a profile for your business, your account may be disabled for violating our Terms of Use. If you have questions about how to best leverage your Facebook Page, please check out our Insider’s Guide or FAQ.
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.
You wouldn’t want a profile anyway!
With a Facebook page, your business will have Fans instead of Friends, and there’s no limit to the number (profiles have a 5,000 friend limit). A Facebook Page allows you so much more in terms of promoting your business! Pages offer many things that a profile does: photos, videos, and wall posts (status updates); but they also offer so much more! You can use your page’s discussion boards to start conversations about specific topics. Use the Question feature to create a Fan Poll. Add applications such as TabPress that allow you to create a welcome message for your page. It even allows you to create two separate messages: one for non-fans (new visitors) and one for fans.
Facebook pages provide you with tools to gauge your traffic and fan participation, as well as to start using Facebook ads (which by the way, I’ve found to be a very good return on investment).
Already have a profile for your business?
Not a problem…but, you should convert it as soon as possible, to avoid losing not only your photos, but your “friends” as well. When you use Facebook’s Conversion Tool, your confirmed friends automatically become fans. Your profile photo will transfer over, but you’ll want to make sure that you save any important photos and status updates from your profile…those WILL NOT TRANSFER. You will want to re-post them when the conversion is complete.
Don’t Forget you will need to have a personal profile set up in your name, in order to be the Administrator of the page. If your business profile was under your name, the conversion tool will address that issue for you.
Social Media is important for your business…make sure you’re following the rules, and using the correct tools!
