As businesses take their first steps in social media marketing and start looking towards the social media sites which have the largest communities, many have been exploring using Facebook as an integral part of their marketing strategy. As we often say, there is no point spending time in the places which the people you want to communicate with aren’t at, so in many cases, Facebook is an excellent choice. But one of the problems is the difficulty in understanding what the difference is between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile.
A Profile is what you have as an individual. For everyone who is on Facebook, we have a profile which shows our likes, dislikes and personalities. The profile is where you can post your status updates, and it is what people ‘friend’. Take it offline – the profile is essentially you. People become friends with you because of who you are.
A Page is what your company has on Facebook. It is the profile of an organisation, not that of an individual (although your organisation may be just you, but the page still represents your company. Of course, you can have pages for all sorts of other things, like TV shows and products, but if you are looking to get your company on Facebook, you will need to create a page.
I have noticed a worrying tendency for new Facebook users to set up a profile for their company, group or organisation. I can see why – profiles allow you to ‘friend people’, pages don’t. People can become your ‘fan’ on a page, but they don’t allow you to invite friends to the page. Also, pages don’t have status updates. They can only come from profiles.
So you may ask, why does it matter? Why not set up a profile for my company and then I can send status updates etc. There is one very good reason why.
It is against the Facebook Terms of Service. And if it is against their rules, they have every right to remove you from the site if you are breaching their rules. Sadly, a lot of people do it simply because they don’t know.
If you dislike the Page functionality, they you could look into setting up a Group for your company instead. That gives you the ability to invite people to it and slighly more functionality than the Page. But use Profiles for you, and Pages (or Groups) for your business. If Facebook is to be at all useful for your social media marketing campaign, you need to be on it – not banned from it.
If you like this post, why not subscribe to our RSS Feed. Or you can visit our main website at Tiger Two or follow me on Twitter or Friendfeed
