A common mistake for businesses on Facebook is to set up a personal profile, rather than a business page. Facebook has clear rules about this and can shut down your profile without warning in which case all your contacts and content are gone.
It can be tricky to move from a profile to a page once it has been around for a long time, and understandably people are afraid of loosing the connections they have built up. That’s why I set up some guidelines as to how this can be done, which you can see below:
Why Can’t My Business Have a Facebook Profile?
- Facebook rules are very clear. Businesses, organisations, brands etc. should have Pages not Profiles.
- Facebook can close down your profile without warning if you don’t follow these rules
- You will not have the Insights analytic tool on a profile, and you are therefore missing out on very important information for your marketing
- You do not have the same advertising possibilities
- You can only have a maximum of 5000 friends (that was the figure last time I checked). I hope you are more ambitious and plan to get more followers for your business than that ;)
(Interestingly, I heard once that the only personal profiles on Facebook that were allowed to exceed the 5k maximum friend limit were the profiles of Barack Obama and of the Facebook man himself, Mark Zuckerberg :)
Click here to get information straight from Facebook on this whole thing!
How Do I Change This?
Click here for Facebook information about migrating your personal profile over to a page.
And this is where you go to start the migration process: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate
Please Note! You can expect errors. In my experience, this is not a very reliable migration process. As a precaution, I recommend you download all the profile’s Facebook data. See information about that here: https://www.facebook.com/help/131112897028467
A Few More Things You Can Do To Increase Chances of Getting Your Profile Friends Over To The Page As Followers:
- Make the old personal profile of your business an administrator of the new Business Page you create
- Have the old profile invite all its friends to like the new Business Page
- Use the large profile image and put a message there that this profile is now inactive and that people should go to the new page and like it – remember to include the url of the new page
- Regularly put a status update on the new profile about the change, asking people to go to the new page and like it
- If you know any of the people who are friends with your business on the profile page, send them a personal message about the change and ask them to go to the new page and like – and while you are at it, ask them to share the new page on their timeline for added exposure ;)
- Change all privacy settings for the profile so that everything is hidden that can be hidden
- DO NOT ad more friends to the profile. If you get a friend request, send them a message directing them to the new page and ask them to like it
- When you see that most, and hopefully all, your friends from the profile page have liked the new business page, close the profile completely – but not before you remember to make your own personal profile the administrator of the page ;)
Click here for instructions on how to permanently delete a Facebook account.
xo
T