Why You Should Stop Using Your Personal Facebook Profile for your Business

As a business owner, you know that your company should have a presence on a variety of social media platforms. With over 1 billion daily active users, there’s a good chance that Facebook is going to figure into your social media marketing plan.

If your business is already on Facebook and engaging with customers and prospects, then that’s great. Facebook wants businesses promoting their offerings through the platform so it lets users set up specific pages for their company. But many people are simply tweaking their personal profile and using this as their business hub. Here are 5 reasons why you need to stop doing that, right now.

1 – It Looks Unprofessional

I’m going to tell you about some specific functionality that you only get through the business pages, but here’s an overarching reason that should get you moving away from your individual profile right now: it just doesn’t look good. Personal profiles are designed to be just that, personal. They have information on gender, birthdays and alike that will simply look odd appearing in people’s feeds about your business. Using your personal profile for your business makes you look small and unprofessional; not the impression you want to be giving to your prospects.

2 – No Access to Page Insights

Facebook wants to make itself valuable to businesses and one way it does this is by providing some really fantastic data to page owners. Stats that tell you how many people saw and interacted with your posts help you to refine your content marketing strategy. Information on the gender, age and location of the people viewing your page lets you nail down your demographic. You don’t get any of this when using your personal profile.

3 – Friend Limit

You might be small right now, but you should always be thinking big. Your personal profile has a limit of 5000 friends, whereas a business page gives you the ultimate scalability of unlimited connections.

4 – No Advertising Possibilities

Creating a business page doesn’t necessarily mean you want to spend any advertising dollars with Facebook, and you don’t have to. But a page does at least give you the option of considering this channel for your paid promotions at some point. Facebook has a lot of data on its users as we mentioned when discussing Page Insights. This lets you target your messaging to specific demographics, interest groups, or friends of your current fans. Needless to say that this isn’t an option on a personal profile.

5 – Facebook Doesn’t Like It

Ultimately, even if there are some things you prefer about using your personal profile for your business, you’re running the risk of having no presence whatsoever. For a number of years now, Facebook has been very clear that it wants people on profiles and businesses on pages. And they’ve threatened to delete the accounts of anyone flouting the rules. So to make sure you stay visible and can use all of the tools available to drive your company forward, switch to a business page today.