Up until a few years ago, if you had a business online you could actually use a personal Facebook profile as your business page. In 2012 though, Facebook made it known that they would be cracking down on these types of people and instead gave them the option to create a fan page i.e.; Facebook Business Profile. To be honest though, if you’ve never checked out a business profile from an admin standpoint, you might not really understand just why these pages are so beneficial. I know for me personally, I would rather have a business page just because of so many of the options, benefits and features available. But, if you’ve never used a Fan page you might not understand why it’s so much better than a regular old profile page. Below, we will be going over the benefits, as well as differences between a regular profile page vs. a business page and you will see essentially why you should be using one rather than a profile page.
Facebook Insights
If you log into your personal profile right now, you can’t really see much as far as data goes. But, if you create a fan page, you will see a whole lot more data – and it’s worth it. Technically speaking, you can’t really see specific data about specific people, but you can see grouped data such as how many women versus men visit your profile, what days/time they visit your profile, where they are from (US, Russia, UK, etc.). You can also see specific information about your posts such as when people read your posts the most. I tend to have a lot of USA visitors and fans, and my people tend to read my posts two times during the day – in the am, usually around 8 or 9 am, and in the afternoon around 4-7 PM, this actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it because it’s the before work people and the after work before dinner people. Facebook Insights can be used for a whole slew of SEO and marketing tactics and any top SEO firm will tell you to keep tabs on these pieces of data because they will not only benefit your SEO and marketing, but they could help you gain more fans, get more views to certain posts and more. Definitely a valuable tool that a personal page just doesn’t offer. To learn more about the benefits of a Facebook fan page or to talk to someone who can set up and manage a fan page for your business contact a top SEO firm in NJ that specializes in Facebook marketing.
Facebook Tabs, Contests, and Offers
You might be able to run contests on your personal page, but sometimes it’s frowned upon by Facebook. Facebook business pages make it easy, and organized to run Facebook contests with third party apps. You can run contests for prizes to get more likes, more shares, etc. FB also has tabs which allow you to really customize your fan page. Authors for instance, can add apps and third party plug ins that will allow them to add a newsletter to their page, add a little bookstore to their page, or even add a best sellers list to showcase their bestselling books. But, these tabs can be good for anyone in any niche, not just Authors. The offers tabs, allow you as admin, to add offers and discounts to certain items you have. For instance let’s go back to the Author example. Say you have an eBook for sale right now, its $2.99 and you want to have a sale to your visitors and fans of the page. You want to make it $.99, available for a limited time to 100 people, and you want it to end a certain time – offers can do all of this for you and it all has that professional look and stays organized.
More Than 5000 “Friends”
As of right now, when you have a personal page you can only have a few thousand friends. I believe the cap is set at 5000. If you become really big, even down the line, you won’t be able to have more than 5000 friends. So you’re probably thinking, I’m just a small business owner (or freelancer) I doubt I’ll ever make 5000 friends. Well, if you think about it with the benefits above and what I am about to list below its already worth it to make a business page, add on to the fact that you are probably going to have your business for a while, and it could hit it big and you could gain a large influx of “friends” and you can clearly see why it’s more beneficial to have a business page. 5000 people is not a lot of people to be honest.
Advertising Options
As a personal profile owner, you do not have options to get advertising. So even if you have a personal page and its set up as a business page, you cannot have advertising opt ins available to you. However, on Fan pages, you can. And to be honest they are pretty awesome. It seems like a few times a year Facebook is adding new advertiser options for business profiles because they really WANT you to use their platform for marketing, they do make money on it after all, so it’s always sort of guaranteed that Twitter and Facebook are going to have the best advertising features and options because when you buy an ad, they make money. If they do well on their part, chances are you will come back and buy more ads which means more money for them!
