Let me preface this by saying that this post is a little bit of a rant.
Let me also say that I know if you are a small business owner, that there is a lot of “stuff” that you probably never thought you’d have to deal with when it comes to marketing your business on the internet.
I know when I went to business school, this wasn’t part of the curriculum.
Then add social media into the mix and it can be overwhelming, I get it.
But this is one of my pet peeves:
Profiles are for People
As in, a Facebook profile is for a person, not a business. If you have a business or web site you want to promote, you need to create a page, not another Facebook profile.
This is a pretty simple concept. I get Facebook “friend” requests all the time from businesses. I am not a “friend” with the the business, I am a friend of the business owner.
Do I accept them? Actually, if they are local, I usually do. It irritates me, but at least they are out there trying. I’m not going to get snippy about it. One example of this is the Humble ISD Education Foundation. I’m not going to give the school foundation a Facebook snub just because the person setting it up didn’t know what they were doing.
So I usually just mumble a little under my breath and make a note to have a talk with the sender the next time I run into them.
But today I got a “connection” request on LinkedIn from “Texas Social Media Expo.”
Again, profiles are for people.
What makes it especially odd on LinkedIn is that the whole purpose of the platform is to connect with other people that are maybe a little further out of your immediate sphere. Do you need to make a contact with someone at a particular company and need an introduction? If you have a friend of a friend of a friend that has a connection, LinkedIn will identify it.
The whole point is that LinkedIn networks you through the companies in your current and past work history, education, and any associations. Creating a new profile for every single business you have defeats the whole purpose of that.
There are company profiles that interact with the personal profiles. You can create events on your personal profile and invite people to them. You can also create a LinkedIn discussion group for a particular topic.
Who is this person who sent me this? I have no idea.
The craziest thing about this is that it is for a social media expo!
Does anyone else see the problem with this? Does this seem incongruent to anyone else?
I am assuming that whomever sent this must be the organizer of the event . . . very odd.
Good post and so true, it’s almost laughable getting a friend request from a company labelling themselves as social media experts. Pages are perfect for companies and companies should not try to have it any other way, they also offer tracking data which can prove to be very valuable for any business.
I feel your pain, but many business owners are honestly confused about the difference between profiles and fan pages. Of course facebook isn’t helping the situation with their terminology.
There are or were at one time, personal profile, fan pages, business pages, company profiles and groups. Then a business owner hears something like:
“Even though you have a personal profule on FB, you should also have one for your company, which is why you need to create a business page for it. Having such fan page for your business would allow you to..”
Surely you can see how this can be beyond confusing. On top of that most business owners just want to run their business, and sincerely wish they could have avoided all this social media stuff to begin with.
Yes, it is confusing, and now add Google + (which I don’t care for) and Pinterest to the mix and it gets even more so.
The other complication that I’ve actually seen quite a bit of recently is an owner actually does create a page, but they either don’t have the address listed or there are duplicate addresses published somewhere. Then Facebook automatically generates a “Places” page for them.
So there are TWO pages, sometimes with fans on each. It can be a big hairy mess to clean up if the admin of the page doesn’t have an email address that is tied to the domain for the business
I had to battle my boss for him to understand that we want a PAGE and not a profile. I was able to convince him when I told him that profiles have a friend limit and of course he thinks we’re going to have thousands and thousands of fans so it worked.
Chris,
Kudos to you! I’ll have to remember that one the next time I get push back for it. 😉
I definately agree, you should not create a profile as a business but rather add a page. I normally don´t even accept friend requests from businesses anymore. Alot of the fault lies with facebook for not being clear with how to advertise your business thru their pages, i think many small business owners are straight up uninformed
Andreas,
Yes, you’re right. I think a lot of businesses are confused how they’re supposed to use Facebook for their business.
I did find instructions somewhere in Facebook’s maze of how-to’s on how you can convert a personal account to a Facebook page, but I’ll have to go back and dig it up.
A nice post which should be read by who are not much aware about the difference about facebook pages and profiles. And so some of buissness leaders are not recognizing the fact ‘profile are for people not for buissness’
It is very confusing, the difference in personal profiles, pages for business and then toss in ‘groups’ and hello! confusing. And hey fb, hows about posting the correct dimensions for the header images for a change? lol …
I’ve gotten to where I’m actually a big fan of stumblupon since the fb owner ditched and ran off to singapore.
Ed,
Very true! And yes, it seems like every time you turn around something changes with Facebook pages.
Excellent tips, I’m already get some great jobs from my LinkedIn profile
Awesome!