One of the first mistakes we see a lot of clients make in their pursuit of social media glory is establishing a personal page for their business. Now, there are a couple of advantages to this, however, overall it is a bad idea for a business to brand themselves using a personal page instead of an actual business page.

Pros

The pros to having a personal fan page come in two forms, friending and tagging. In friending it is easier to pickup followers because you can simply add “Mutual Friends” every day in order to expose your brand. The only problem with this is that it could be considered intrusive. The second good thing about a personal page comes in the form of tagging people in photos. Facebook only allows you to tag people in your friends list, hence if you have a business page and the admin isn’t friends with the people being tagged… they can’t tag them or your business. Hopefully Facebook will address this in the future.

Cons

Friend limit – You are limited to only 5,000 friends on a personal page, if you plan on doing social media properly you’re going to need more room than that!

Search Engine Optimization – Google and Yahoo index fan pages NOT personal pages. So with a personal page you are losing almost ALL of your search engine benefits which is a huge perk to social media.

Professionalism – Your brand is not a person and therefore should not be represented as one. If you want your business to be viewed as professional then you need to make sure that you appear that way… even in social media.

Tracking – Business fan pages allow you to track the interactions you are receiving to your page specifically. This is huge in your marketing campaign because it allows you to see what is working and what is not. Next we will talk about how tracking is one of the most important elements of acquiring new customers.

Future Problems – As the developers of Facebook help the site become more intuitive, they will allow the missed abilities that businesses need. They will also eventually begin to tighten restrictions on those in the wrong places. When that day comes or when you grow too large, do you want to be the one trying to convert 5,000 “friends.” This also creates segmentation of your target market causing you to have to update in multiple places and have a harder time showing your true following.

The Verdict

It is easier to accrue “friends” using a personal page earlier on but as you begin to grow you will very quickly start to see the drawbacks to this approach. Remember, trying to do something the easy way is no excuse for doing it the right way and you could be saving yourself a lot of headaches down the road. To stay on top of what is happening with Facebook changes, check out their actual blog here. Now lets get to work on getting more customers!