A personal Profile on Facebook is easy to open. If you don’t already have a personal Profile set up on Facebook and you want to engage and develop social connections for your business, run (don’t walk) to Facebook and set up an account. Facebook makes it super-easy. Right from the home page, enter your
First and last name
E-mail address (and then again as confirmation)
Password
Gender
Birthday
Facebook requires all users to provide their real date of birth to encourage authenticity and provide only age-appropriate access to content. You will be able to hide this information from your personal connections (and people who like your business Page), if you want, and its use is governed by the Facebook Privacy Policy.
After entering the necessary personal information, click the Sign Up button. You now have a Facebook personal Profile.
On the Facebook home page, you may be tempted to click the link below the account creation fields that says Create a Page for a Celebrity, Band, or Business. Don’t click it! This link creates a business account. A business account has limited functionality; it’s for people who don’t already have a Facebook personal Profile and who want to only administer a business Page and run ad campaigns.
When you create a business account, you won’t be able to interact on Facebook in a normal way. It’s very limiting. According to Facebook, you won’t be able to share other posts, like Pages, or comment.
You won’t be able to view personal Profiles, and worst of all, business accounts can’t be found in a search. There might be rare situations in which you need this type of account, though, and for such cases, you can find the instructions for opening a business account at the end of this chapter.
Some people worry that visitors will see the connection between their personal Profile and the business Page they create, so they make a bogus personal Profile before they open their business Page. This isn’t recommended. Besides, Facebook frowns on creating fake accounts. Facebook might delete all your Facebook accounts if it discovers that you’ve been creating fake Profiles. Don’t risk the wrath of Facebook by setting up a bogus account!
Be assured that people who choose to connect to your business Page won’t be able to see that you’re the Page owner or Admin (administrator), or have access to your personal Profile, unless you change your Page settings to list yourself publicly as an Admin of the Page.
It’s all very clear from Facebook’s side: You may create business Pages only to represent real organizations of which you are an authorized representative. There’s no pretending to be someone you’re not. In other words, even if you intended all along for the account you created to be just a great joke, Facebook lacks a sense of humor in that regard.
It’s important to note that it’s against Facebook policy to create a personal Profile that uses the name of the business — as in O’Grady’s for the first name and Cleaners for the last name. If you do create a personal Profile for your business in this fashion, Facebook can (and will) delete all your accounts, and they won’t be reinstated.
Facebook will let you migrate your personal Profile to a business Profile Page, sometimes called a business Profile.
If you already have a personal Profile with your real name, with many Friends who are actually business connections, you may want to explore the subscribe option and/or build a business Page and ask everyone to like it.
If your personal Profile has been functioning as a business, with a business name (like the O’Grady Cleaners example above), you may want to change the account name to your real name and then explore the Subscribe option and/or build a business Page and ask everyone to like it.
