3 Reasons You Shouldn't use your Personal Facebook Page for Business

At work I was speaking to a client the other day who told me that he had a Facebook account already and was just planning on using that to market his business services. "OK," was my reply, "but let me send you some sample pages from Facebook for you to take a look at, just so you can see the range of what's out there." I emailed over some links and pondered how best to address this with him.

Then later today I was in a discussion group online and saw a thread that was asking the question about using a "personal" Facebook for "business. Since it seems to be in the zeitgeist these days, I thought I'd share my ideas here.

It is my belief that if you use your "personal" Facebook page for "business", you limit yourself in some crucial ways.

First of all, Facebook sets a finite number of friends you can have (5,000) as an individual.

Secondly, one cannot "like" a personal Facebook page so you will have to consistently generate content (i.e.: work harder) in order to show up in your "friend's" news feed. If someone has "liked" your page they will see your content automatically.

Finally, there are so many fantastic third party apps for Facebook "business" pages that are not available for "personal" pages. I have clients who have tabs linking to their newsletters, YouTube or any number of resources that further relate to their business. These tools are readily available, easy to implement and cost nothing but the time it takes to set up - often just a few minutes.

If you remain unconvinced as to why you should have a business page on Facebook, consider this: do you really want the public, clients and people you do business with making assumptions about you based on the content that gets shared on your wall by your kids, personal friends, college roommates and others?

Just because you know that red plastic cup you're holding in a picture has soda in it, doesn't mean someone else looking at the photo will assume that. Yes, there are some sharing controls on Facebook, but they can be difficult to locate and therefore implement.

Why risk the potential pitfalls when you can readily set up a "Business" page on Facebook which can be managed by using the Use Facebook as Page switch under the Account drop down menu?

You already have a built-in set of "fans" for your page in all of your personal friends. The "average user" has 130 of them. You can easily share your new page with your personal friends, asking them to "like" it - thereby getting you the 25 likes for the custom URL. You can have a page dedicated just for "business" - increasing your social media footprint, SEO and number of eyes on your product or service.

Alternatives to Facebook -- what are the options?

Maybe you've just had enough. Perhaps your profile's been hacked, or you can't sort out the byzantine privacy settings options, maybe one of your "friends" mentioned a sex organ in status their update, (Once was enough to get me to "unfriend" you...) Or maybe you just long for something different.

Well dear reader, before FB Quitting Day May 31, 2010, here are some of your choices. Old and new soc nets (social networks) for your review.

Diaspora - the latest new, new thing. It's the sweetheart start-up developed by four charmingly geekalicious young lads from NYU and crowd funded by Kickstarter. It's not actually a social network yet. But they're working on writing the code to make it an open source alternative. They aren't the first ones out there per this link I found. (However to be honest, the Linux, Apache, MySql and Php talk starts to get a bit too techy for me and my brain melts just a little. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

Friendster - 'Memba them? I first heard of them in 1994 and even then it was a little late to be an early adopter.

Then there's Whspr, another recent entry into the soc-net-o-sphere which I mentioned in last week's Noo Yeek column.

Posterous - is a blog/soc-net hybrid you can see mine here. I know it's a bit light on the content, I'm just trying it out.

Ning is an option that I have used for an alumni network or maybe Orkut, a soc-net that is integrated into your Google-verse.

And another exile from soc-net Hipster-ville that might get a resurrection from the Facebook "diaspora" (oh those boys are clever name choosers!) is MySpace which seemed to loose steam and members once it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

I doubt people will leave LinkedIn or stop using Twitter due to privacy concerns since those are more readily controlled in terms of whom they broadcast to and yes, while Twitter isn't quite a social networking site, (really microblogging) it is a soc-net tool.

The meta narrative is privacy online. What is is, who controls it, how is it filtered and layered? Clearly the cows have long since left the barn, so it's really verbum sap sat. Everything you post on FB (or the internet) becomes part of the whole. They know a lot about you, because you give it to them, everyday. As one of my Facebook status updates read this week, "all your Face are belong to us".


Thank you Hank Grebe and Mediaspin.com for such a great image.

NOOYEEK

 New and unique  = Newique

(new-yeek)

Bitter Yellow flowers, I think they are some kind of daisy. (Does anyone else feel that this color yellow has a bitter taste/smell?)

Tactical Philanthropy 
It sounds like Soldier of Fortune meets the Chronicle of Philanthropy!

Temple Grandin speaking at the TED conference about different kinds of thinkers.
Cowgirl shirts are awesome!

Transparency Now
Let's make it clear...essays on the media and popular culture

And two new places to post items online
Posterous and Whspr

Whspr is in beta and is going for the people who are fleeing Facebook due to privacy issues. There's even a Quit Facebook Day on May 31, 2010.

Is anyone else using these? Or others? The Huffington Post has a blip about this here.