How To Convert A Facebook Profile Into A Page
A little-known feature of Facebook is the ability to convert a personal Facebook profile into a Business page. This feature was designed to help people transition away from using their Facebook personal profile to promote their business. This practice, although a violation of Facebook's terms of use, has become extremely common.
Facebook apparently realized this, and instead of embarking on ban campaigns to get rid of business promotion on personal pages, has simply released an option to easily transfer from a personal to a Business page.
The primary feature of the conversion is its retention of all your Friends as fans of your new business. All of your personal page's Friends will automatically "Like" your business, without their notification or consent. The conversion will also retain your active profile photo, but that's it. All other content will be permanently deleted. It is highly recommended that you back up all personal photos and other information before converting.
You can download a complete backup of all your Facebook data by using Facebook's Account Settings. Click Account Settings, then "Download a copy of your Facebook data," then "Start my archive." After your transfer you can make a new Facebook personal page by re-adding your Friends and uploading the content, bit by bit.
There are a lot of very good reasons to convert to a Business Page. Despite what it says in the terms of use, Facebook very rarely bans users for business promotion on personal pages. You don't have to worry about that. However, you still might want to transfer to a business page for a number of reasons. The first is the personal page Friend limit of 5000. If you are serious about promoting your business through your personal page, you will eventually run up against that limit. Since you will need to migrate on to a Business page, it is better to convert earlier than later. If you wait before converting, all the marketing content you produce from now until the conversion will be wiped out in the conversion process.
Even if you don't ever expect to hit the 5000 Friend limit, it can still be a good idea to convert to a Business page. Business pages offer more options for SEO. For example, by including keywords in your page title, you can garner more favorable search engine indexing. You can also make all of your content totally public, while still retaining personal photos and content on a private profile. This makes it much easier for people who don't already know you to learn about your business.
A Business page also makes promotions easier. You can easily send out information about your services, special events, or discounts to all your fans. When you announce events on a Business page, it ignores the "popularity ranking" system of personal posts, giving you a better spot on their newsfeeds.
In short, if you use your Facebook profile as a marketing tool, there are a lot of very good reasons that you should convert it over to a Business page. However, if you currently do not do any promotions through your personal profile, it could be jarring for your friends to suddenly be getting ad content from your business.
It can also be personally time-consuming to backup and upload all of your personal content and rebuild your Friends list. If you are new to Facebook marketing, it may be easier to just build a new Business Page from scratch instead.
Steve is a Social Media Manager and Google AdWords Certified Individual at TechWyse, an internet marketing firm based in Toronto, Canada. TechWyse specializes in SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing. You can read more of Steve's writing at TechWyse.com/blog.
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