With over 400 million people on Facebook, it is definitely a wise business move to make sure you’re on Facebook. But there is a huge difference between your Facebook personal profile, and a Facebook (fan) page.
Personal Profiles are great for connecting with real-life friends and family; and of course, you could connect with anyone you want, including business associates. However, the down-side to Facebook personal profiles is the 5,000 friend limit.
I recently saw a well known internet marketer announce that they had reached their 5,000 friend limit and was asking everyone to connect with them on the Facebook page, which has no connection limits.
My suggestion is to direct all your business connections to your Facebook page and not your personal profile. Pages are the business side of Facebook, not profiles. The friend connection limitation of profiles can eventually put you, as a business owner/entrepreneur, in a tough spot when you reach your friend limit.
If you’re like me, and many others, all along you have been adding everyone as a ‘friend’ on Facebook, and of course, getting ‘fans’ to your page as well. However, after seeing many reach that friend limit and then have to turn away ‘friends’; I decided to make some changes in how I use Facebook.
I’ve been going through my friends list on my personal profile and limiting those connections to only those who are literally my family and personal friends.
I have drafted a response that I am sending to any friend requests that are not family or personal friends, asking them to connect with me via my Facebook page.
I am all for connecting and being social online; I follow over 10,000 on Twitter and have at least that many following me in return – so I’m a power connector!
However, Facebook is not Twitter, so therefore how I choose to use Facebook is not the same as how I use Twitter.
Hopefully this advice will help you see the obstacle you may soon face, if your friends list on your personal profile continues to grow and you reach that 5,000 limit threshold. Directing business contacts to your fan page will circumvent the limit.
To YOUR Success,
Traci
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Thanks for the great tips Traci. I’ll be building a “Fan Page” for my buisness soon and it’s helpful to know which to promote the most.
I do so look forward to the day I have to worry about reaching the 5,000 friend limit on my personal page. LOL
Sharon McPherson
@SharonMcP
.-= Sharon McPherson´s last blog ..Fibromyalgia Awareness Day – May 12, 2010 =-.
Hey Sharon… It really only takes a couple minutes to get a basic fan page up and running. So no need to wait on that! Just do it!
You can always add custom landing tabs, etc.. later.
I keep hearing about the “Fan Pages” and I do have one but now I don’t know what to do with it. There’s always been tons of “How To’s” for Twitter but I’m not finding much in “How To” for Facebook. Still looking. Thanks for the reminder in this great post.
I have facebook page already and so far i have 800 friends inside..any idea how to open that page separately from our personal account??because to add some information to my page, i have open my personal account first and then switch to my facebook page. i’m wondering i can open and add something to my page without open my personal account. thanks for advise
Great post. Just a question: I know with FB you can pretty much laser target an audience, but when trying to market to this group what’s your experience on CTR on promo’s? I’ve bookmarked the site and look forward to more insightful info…