Something we’ve been seeing a lot of lately is businesses who’ve obviously put significant work and effort into developing a Facebook presence, but sadly without checking out the rules of the road first. If we were going for the shortest blog post of the year award, this would just consist of the following two images:
YES! Your page is correctly set up.
All present and correct
Er, NO. You really didn’t want to do it that way:
It's bad news I'm afraid, Mr Smith...
The screenshots are probably more than sufficient for most, but just in case… here are the details as marked up by the inimitable Rose McGrory pink crayon:
Businesses do not have Friends, Education & Work history, or Likes & Interests. If your page does, it’s because you’ve set it up as a personal profile during the initial registration process. Facebook takes a very dim view of this, and in due course is likely to take down your page. Businesses SHOULD have the all-important “like” button, and a list of people who like that page.
If you’ve set up your page incorrectly, you really should sort things out sooner rather than later – if you continue to promote it and gain “friends” in the wrong format, you may lose all your work if the page gets deleted by Facebook.
The good news is that there’s an easy fix for this – a relatively little known function exists which allows you to migrate your personal page into a business page. Have a look here: changing facebook profile to a business page.
True but its so easy for anyone to leap in a create a page for their business compared to creating a website design. And this ease actively encourages more people to get involved. It doesn’t help that people in the ‘industry’ try to confuse and create mystery around facebook by talking of fan pages which it seems are good old business pages.
From memory, the Fan Page confusion is probably Facebook’s fault as that’s what they were originally called. Then the light dawned that businesses using it = revenues for Facebook in the long term, and the terminology got tweaked a little bit.
The comparison with committing to a website design is interesting – I think you’ve hit on a problem with social media generally! On the surface it appears so “quick and easy” to jump in to that businesses sometimes don’t think about why they’re doing it, or what the long term goals are – and before you know it, it’s easy to have put in many hours of work to no particular end?