Some people use their personal Facebook Profile to engage their clients or customers, which can be problematic. If you do not also have a personal Facebook Profile (which goes against Facebook Terms of Service) just for your friends and family, your wall will be a jumble of personal and business messages that are not entirely appropriate for either community.
While it’s expressly against Facebook’s rules to have more than one personal profile, many people do. Having more than one allows them to keep their business and personal profiles (and messages) separate. If you find that you have lots of “friends” on your personal profile whom you don’t know, and who are there to receive information regarding your business message, then I recommend converting your profile to a business page.
Should you post personal messages only on your personal profile, and not your business profile? Not necessarily. Personal updates add a personal touch to your business message. Social media is social. While most of your posts should be about your business or and products, remember that your Facebook business page is not a web page. You still want to engage people in a personal way. People use Facebook to connect to other people, including the people behind the businesses they like. When they feel connected to you in a personal way, you’re building trust, and people will do business with people they like and trust.
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As someone who maintains (or tries to
two Facebook profiles, one for my roller derby persona and one for my personal friends and family, I would have disagreed with you prior to Facebook enabling the use facebook as a page feature. Mine is certainly a different use case than you’re describing. Spin Shady is not a business. I haven’t converted my Spin Shady profile into a page, but I’ve seen other rollergirls with pages for themselves who haven’t had quite the success making the same connections as a page. Omaha Rollergirls however is a page that I started, and in that case, having the fan base under a page was most appropriate, but before the use FB as a page feature, it was difficult to connect back with fans at times. I’m much happier with the new page features.
Thank you Sandi! You’ve certainly had some solid experience with this question.