Facebook Profile vs. Page–Which Do You Use for Business?
Facebook Profiles vs. Pages. The debate rages on.
Facebook developed Pages as a way for businesses to promote themselves and to make a distinction between people and businesses. But many people continue to use their profile for business use.
Mike Klingler, creator of the Renegade Professional internet marketing training site, started a Facebook discussion about Profile Pages vs. Fan Pages for business use.
The discussion is heating up, with people on both sides feeling strongly about their choices.
Which do you prefer? Do you mind blending your business life with your personal, or do you prefer to keep them separate.
Below is my response to this discussion. You won’t find it posted because Facebook is being a little glitchy and I can’t get it to post.
Hi Mike,
I’m trying this one more time today.
I agree that we need to walk our talk so that our private lives and our business lives are in sync in terms of our values. I can’t imagine finding contentment if I thought a certain value applied to one part of my life and not the other. I’d be wacky in no time if I lived like that.
So I’m completely on board with a holistic approach to one’s biz life.
Still, there are some very real reasons why people want to separate the 2 parts of their lives in terms of FB.
I only friend people I know but I allow anyone to fan me. If I used my profile for biz, then I would have lots of friends who were actually strangers. Further, by doing this biz I have chosen to have my name spread across the internet, while my friends and family have not. If I make my profile page very public, these are my concerns:
1.The privacy of my loved ones. If my friends and family post about their lives and I have strangers who can access my wall, their lives are suddenly public. Yes, I know that FB is not private, but not everyone grasps that. I am friended with lots of kids and I don’t want their info exposed to people I don’t know.
2. Spamming my friends and family. My loved ones have not requested biz info from me. Even if my content if superb, it’s spammy to talk about work in a home setting (it’s a little like pulling out the compensation plan during Thanksgiving dinner). My profile friends want to hear about my private life, not the latest email marketing technique.
To me, this is the implementation of Attraction Marketing. As long as my loved ones have not asked for my biz info, I won’t flash it in front of them. When they see my magnificent success and how I glow with happiness in my biz, I’m sure they’ll come knocking at my door!
3. Sometimes I just want to be private. Of course I share a lot about my private life in my biz and I’m quite proud of my personal accomplishments. But there are times I just want to make a post that doesn’t go in my biz life (maybe this is the introvert in me talking). Maybe I want to kvetch about the weather with a friend who understands or maybe I have a kooky interest that I want to share with just my friends. This separation seems healthy to me.
Note: even as I write this I know it is only half true–if I really wanted to share intimately with my friends, I wouldn’t choose FB to do it. In reality, FB is false intimacy. But I’m sure you can get the idea.
Yes, I know that I can fuss with the privacy settings on FB and address many of these concerns. But privacy setting are not foolproof and they are an extra step.
The point is that I think one can be in alignment with our values and still want our profile separate from our biz page.
So Mike, you suggested that there should be no problem with mingling biz and private, and I suggest that there is no problem with separating them either.
@Eric, and @ Brian,
Eric, I love your story. I can really see the value in sharing yourself and like I said, I have never been one person in public and a different person in private. I agree that we are who we are, in biz and in our lives.
But for me, I still relate to Brian’s experience that there are some parts of ourselves that we share best with our most intimate family and friends. There are private moments when I want or need my family support and for a myriad of reasons, don’t want strangers to be part of that moment.
Eric–your example of asking a question and getting answers from a really wide group of friends–both close and distant is great. But your question wasn’t particularly personal–it was interesting (in fact, it was a brilliant question to engage people!). The same question could be used on a page or a profile. And I think it was its uniqueness that attracted people to answer. Would you have gotten 23 comments if you had just said that you had oatmeal for breakfast? And would you have gotten the same branding?
It’s interesting that you feel like your page builds your brand and identity because I have the opposite experience. When I see a feed with all sorts of musing and revelations from people I barely know, it doesn’t engage me in them. I need a relationship with them first before I care about their private life or their philosophies.
Maybe part of our thoughts about profile vs. page comes from our own experiences with how we bond with people. For me, I can’t imagine bonding over FB. For you, FB can start the relationship. For me, FB comes AFTER I know them.
Thanks, Mike, for this discussion. I’ve been trying to help people with just these issues and it is really great to have a discussion to explore them in.
Julia
