Are you still using your personal Facebook Account to promote your small business? Well, you might wanna do something about that. Switch from personal Facebook account to a Facebook Page perhaps.
Many of us on Facebook are aware of the fact that it is against Facebook’s terms to use personal account for any business purpose. According to Facebook, pages are only designed to do business and this should not be performed from a personal account. Business promotion should only be limited to Pages in order to help it connect with potential customers. If your want to share updates on your personal account and reach a larger network than just your friends, you can let people follow you, you do not have to be friends on Facebook.
But if you have a page, you can access Page Insights, where you can monitor all your page reviews and preference. You can see important factors like which post is mostly engaged with, viewers demographics like age and their location and what not! You can also give access to any trusted other so they can also make edits to the page and post updates during your unavailability. Fortunately, it is now easy to convert a Facebook profile to a Facebook Page. This process is called Profile to business page migration.
If you have a semi public Facebook profile, and you’re thinking about turning it into a page, you may be wondering what will happen. Let’s go few things you need to take into consideration before converting a profile to a page
- You can only convert your profile to a Page one time.
- After the conversion of your personal profile to a page you will have a personal account and a Page.
- Facebook will transfer your profile picture and your cover photo to the Page. You will need to update the Page with images that are appropriate for your business.
- The name on your personal account will become the Page name.
- Facebook provides tool to help you move information from your profile to your Page for 14 days after the conversion.
- You can choose friends from your profile to automatically like your new Page.
- Posts on your profile will not be carried to your Page.
- You can manage your Facebook Page from your personal profile.
- All of your friends and followers will be migrated to fans of your new Facebook page.
- Your new page won’t show up in your follower’s interest lists.
- You won’t be able to see personal messages from your old profile.
- You will no longer be in any of the groups you’ve joined.
Managing business promotion from your personal profile is really a headache, you do not get the marketing insights about your followings and you will never be known to how much interest people are showing for your business. That is not a good start for your business promotion.Facebook pages can also be included in interest lists and can be Liked by other pages too, this helps for promoting your business through other businesses on Facebook. Also a thing to keep in mind is that a Facebook profile is limited to only 5000 friends (followers are not limited, though), you will need to migrate to Facebook page if this limit is reached. Also according to Facebook terms, if you are promoting a business with your personal Facebook profile, however, as it is against the Terms Of Service to use a personal page for a business, Facebook will not reverse any Pages that look to be promoting a business. Be warned!
There are a lot of reasons to migrate from a profile to a page. If you do not want to think about all these things you can simply create a new page and make your followers aware about it. What ever fits your need.
Before you start, take the following in mind
- Back up your personal data ( messages, updates, photos and other personal data using Facebook backup tool)
- Change your Profile name and address, both matching your business need and for privacy.
- Select new group admin and page admin (if you manage any page or groups).
- You can start the conversion process.
Download your Profile’s Content | Backup Personal Data
- Click the drop-down arrow on the top right of the page and select ‘Settings’.
- Go to the ‘General’ tab in your ‘Settings’.
- Click on the ‘Download a Copy of your Facebook data’ link at the bottom.
- Click the ‘Start My Archive’ button.
Change Profile Name and Address
You will need to change your name and address that will indicate your business profile. For this,
- Go to ‘Account Settings’ to change your name.
- Go to your profile and click ‘Update Info’ to access and change your address.
Choose New Group and Page Admin
If you already have a group you mange as admin through your Facebook page, you will need to assign a new admin for these groups. After you convert your profile to a page, if you are the sole admin of the page, the pages will now be admin-less, because the conversion deletes the “Old Profile” For which, you need to be alert before the conversion, you may loose your page and profile.
Convert Personal Profile To Page
After you have finally decided to migrate from profile to page,
- Login to Facebook Account with proper username and password that you are admin of the page.
- You will have to go Here. This link will redirect you to the Page creation.
- Next you will need to choose a category that is most appropriate for your business. Proceed to next step.
- You will be asked to enter your password. Provide your password to confirm migration.
- Congratulations, your page is now created plus your Facebook friends have been converted to Likes on your Page. Your page should look something like
Merge Duplicate Pages on Facebook
Also if you already consist of a Facebook Page and a profile that you are migrating, you can also merge them together, i.e if you are admin of both pages and if they both promote from the same business. This clearly means that the name and address need to match. Facebook will merge the page that has fewer likes to other page with more like! But photos and usernames will be lost in the process. You will have to prepare for this, keep a backup if necessary. If your personal profile is not necessarily promoting your business, create a new page and hope for your fans to follow you. As this merging process will lose a lot of personal information. Then again, if you are using your personal account for clearly a business, you will need to migrate before Facebook shuts you down.
To merge you pages you will need to do the following
-
- Go to the Page with more likes. This will be the one you will be keeping.
- Go to top of your Page, click ‘Edit Page’.
- Select ‘Update Info’
- Select ‘Resources’ from the left sidebar.
- Click on ‘Merge duplicate Pages’ link. This link will only appear if you manage two Pages with similar names.
- You will see a dialogue which shows pages you manage that can be merged. Select the pages you wish to merge. If you are merging pages with a location, they must have the same address information.
Contents on the page with more likes will remain the same except for addition of likes and check-ins from fewer likes pages will be made. Facebook removes the page with fewer likes and you will not be able to undo it.
If you know any User that has a profile instead of a Facebook Page, or a friend who would like to position themselves as a public figure or personal brand on Facebook, pass this information to them and let us know if it helped.
